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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
Ought
Cobol
Regarded
Criminal
Criminals
Teaching

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The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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Beauty is our business.
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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.
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The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
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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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A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
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Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
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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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There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
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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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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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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.
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Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.
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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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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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Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
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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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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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Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
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