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If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.

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
Proud
Without
Writing
Mind
Publication
Scientific
Discovery
Habit

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Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
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The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
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The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
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Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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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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... as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than to try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.
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The use of COBOL cripples the mind its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
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Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
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I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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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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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
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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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