I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this," well, that would be enough immortality for me. Edsger Dijkstra More Quotes by Edsger Dijkstra More Quotes From Edsger Dijkstra The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics. Edsger Dijkstra ingredients appreciate steps Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding. Edsger Dijkstra understanding doe mean Programming in Basic causes brain damage. Edsger Dijkstra damage causes brain The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities. Edsger Dijkstra learning profound thinking The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. Edsger Dijkstra humorous teaching witty The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. Edsger Dijkstra scientist confused challenges Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource. Edsger Dijkstra resources In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent". Edsger Dijkstra writing numbers book I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist. Edsger Dijkstra computer waste needs 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 recovery college teaching We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible. Edsger Dijkstra learning mean thinking The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges. Edsger Dijkstra source challenges world In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism. Edsger Dijkstra real expression attention Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs. Edsger Dijkstra programming bugs absence Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible. Edsger Dijkstra learning space wise 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 Dijkstra skulls humility clever 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. Edsger Dijkstra learning profound thinking 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 naive thinking 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. Edsger Dijkstra independent suffering motivational Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Edsger Dijkstra teaching use joy
