Edsger W. Dijkstra Short Quotes

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

Edsger W. Dijkstra
We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!

Edsger W. Dijkstra
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

Edsger W. Dijkstra
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.

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

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
The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

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
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
Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.

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
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
When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

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
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
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
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 W. Dijkstra
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.

Edsger W. Dijkstra
Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

Edsger W. Dijkstra