22 quotes
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
Dijkstra (1970)
The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
Dijkstra (1988)
It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
Dijkstra (2000)
Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
Dijkstra (1982)
The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.
Dijkstra (1970)
May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.
Dijkstra (1998)
Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.
Dijkstra (1978)
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
Dijkstra (1984)
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.
Dijkstra (1970)
One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!
Dijkstra (1972)
It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity.
Dijkstra (1996)
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 to the problem set?
Dijkstra (1976)
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.
Dijkstra (1979)
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs
Dijkstra (1969)
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
Dijkstra (1972)
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)
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)
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)