Edsger Dijkstra Quotes - Page 4

Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about the go to statement. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

[Though computer science is a fairly new discipline, it is predominantly based on the Cartesian world view. As Edsgar W. Dijkstra has pointed out] A scientific discipline emerges with the - usually rather slow! - discovery of which aspects can be meaningfully 'studied' in isolation for the sake of their own consistency.

I now have had my foggy crystal ball for quite a long time. Its predictions are invariably gloomy and usually correct, but I am quite used to that and they won't keep me from giving you a few suggestions, even if it is merely an exercise in futility whose only effect is to make you feel guilty.

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.

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.

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

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.

... as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than to try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.

Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.

Beauty is our business.

The use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible to argue about programs independently of their being executed.

The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.

We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.

In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.

PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

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

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.

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

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.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.

When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.