Edsger Dijkstra Quotes
Top 47 wise famous quotes and sayings by Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Dijkstra Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Edsger Dijkstra on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.
The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.
If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent.'
The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.
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.
The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
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.
Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.
If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.