Quotes from Edsger Dijkstra

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.

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.

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.

Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.

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.

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

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

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

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

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

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.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.

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.

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

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

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.

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.

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.

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.

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

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

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