Edsger W. Dijkstra Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952, and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
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.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
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.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. Since in the US the influence of industry is more pervasive than elsewhere, the above dogma hurts American computing science most. The moral of this sad part of the story is that as long as computing science is not allowed to save the computer industry, we had better see to it that the computer industry does not kill computing science.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!

Edsger W. Dijkstra
The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
We can found no scientific discipline, nor a hearty profession, on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and, mainly, one computer manufacturer.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy......

Edsger W. Dijkstra
In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork". For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit". Very.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
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.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
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 W. Dijkstra