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Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.

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
Regarded
Criminal
Criminals
Teaching
Ought
Cobol

More quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

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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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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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Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
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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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Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.
Edsger Dijkstra
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
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Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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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If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
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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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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
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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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The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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Beauty is our business.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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The use of COBOL cripples the mind its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
Edsger Dijkstra
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people sometimes they follow it!
Edsger Dijkstra