Edsger W. Dijkstra > Quotes

“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 Wybe 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

“Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”
― Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

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

“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 W. Dijkstra

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

“If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
― 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

“Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. ”
― Edsger W. 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 purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.”
― 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 Dijkstra

“Your obligation is that of active participation. You should not act as knowledge-absorbing sponges, but as whetstones on which we can all sharpen our wits”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Let me try to explain to you, what to my taste is characteristic for all intelligent thinking. It is, that one is willing to study in depth an aspect of one's subject matter in isolation for the sake of its own consistency, all the time knowing that one is occupying oneself only with one of the aspects. We know that a program must be correct and we can study it from that viewpoint only; we also know that it should be efficient and we can study its efficiency on another day, so to speak. In another mood we may ask ourselves whether, and if so: why, the program is desirable. But nothing is gained—on the contrary!—by tackling these various aspects simultaneously. It is what I sometimes have called "the separation of concerns", which, even if not perfectly possible, is yet the only available technique for effective ordering of one's thoughts, that I know of. This is what I mean by "focusing one's attention upon some aspect": it does not mean ignoring the other aspects, it is just doing justice to the fact that from this aspect's point of view, the other is irrelevant. It is being one- and multiple-track minded simultaneously.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra, Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective

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

“By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence. –”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, boils down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to avoid unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many different concerns.”
― Edsger W. 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 W. Dijkstra

“Computer science is not about machines, in
the same way that astronomy is not about
telescopes. There is an essential unity of
mathematics and computer science.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“I think it wise, and only honest, to warn you that my goal is immodest. It is not my purpose to "transfer knowledge" to you that, subsequently, you can forget again. My purpose is no less than to effectuate in each of you a noticeable, irreversable change. I want you to see and absorb calculational arguments so effective that you will never be able to forget that exposure.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“In a society in which the educational system is used as an instrument for the establishment of a homogenized culture, in which the cream is prevented from rising to the top, the education of competent programmers could be politically impalatable.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra, EWD 340: The Humble Programmer

“The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.”
― 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 Humble Programmer

“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra