Edsger Wybe Dijkstra Quotes

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras. ~ Alan Kay

When I came back from Munich, it was September, and I was Professor of Mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Later I learned that I had been the Department's third choice, after two numerical analysts had turned the invitation down; the decision to invite me had not been an easy one, on the one hand because I had not really studied mathematics, and on the other hand because of my sandals, my beard and my "arrogance" (whatever that may be). ~ Edsger Dijkstra

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

I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a structured something or a virtual something, or abstract, distributed or higher-order or applicative and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

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

It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits. ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary. ~ Rineke Dijkstra

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus. ~ Edsger 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 Dijkstra

Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor of four; probably it is worse. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

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

Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. ~ 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 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

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

Beauty is our business. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met. ~ Edsger 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 Dijkstra

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent.' ~ Edsger 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 Dijkstra

... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names - otherwise you would be selling nothing - like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering". ~ Edsger Dijkstra

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

As a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than to try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called 'life', expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

[Though computer science is a fairly new discipline, it is predominantly based on the Cartesian world view. As Edsgar W. Dijkstra has pointed out] A scientific discipline emerges with the - usually rather slow! - discovery of which aspects can be meaningfully 'studied in isolation for the sake of their own consistency. ~ Edsger Dijkstra