Edsger W. Dijkstra quotes

Edsger W. Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, renowned for his pioneering work in algorithms and programming. His contributions include the development of Dijkstra's algorithm and major advances in programming methodology. He transformed computer science by advocating formal verification and structured programming. Here are 97 of his quotes:

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. (Edsger W. Dijkstra)
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. (Edsger W. Dijkstra)
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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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? View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
[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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. (Edsger W. Dijkstra)
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
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. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra