Quotes from Edsger Dijkstra

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

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.

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

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

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.

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.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

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.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

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

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

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.

Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.