Edsger W. Dijkstra Quotes
1930–2002 Netherlands
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist, mathematician, programmer, software engineer, and science essayist.
- Netherlands
- Educators
- Essayists
- Programmers
Also known as: Dijkstra, Dijkstra, Edsger, Edsger Dijkstra, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Random Edsger W. Dijkstra quote
53 quotes
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.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
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.
Dijkstra (1984)
The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
Dijkstra (1984)
My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
Dijkstra (1988)
We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.
The Humble Programmer (1972)
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.
Dijkstra (1986)
Some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.
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.
Dijkstra (2000)
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.
Dijkstra (1994)
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.
Dijkstra (1970)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
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