Edsger Dijkstra Quotes - Page 2

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

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

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

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.

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

When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide.

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

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.

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

...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

… 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”.

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

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

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

We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!

Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.

It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.

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.

Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

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.

In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork." For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit." Very.

Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

It is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to.

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