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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.

Edsger Dijkstra

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Edsger Dijkstra
Age: 72 †
Born: 1930
Born: May 11
Died: 2002
Died: August 5
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Mathematician
Physicist
Scientist
University Teacher
R'dam
Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Dijkstra
EWD
E.W. Dijkstra
Beyond
Hope
Mutilated
Regeneration
Programmers
Mentally
Potential

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Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.
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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.
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Beauty is our business.
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FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
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A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.
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Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
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It is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to.
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I think of the company advertising Thought Processors or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
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Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
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Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees.
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When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.
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