Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra; 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrumfrom 1952 to 1962. He was a professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technologyand a research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation. He held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 1999, and retired as Professor Emeritus in 1999...
Edsger Dijkstra quotes about
jargon brevity aim
Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
giving effort design
... 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.
learning osmosis design
Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.
mean learning thinking
We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.
challenges intellectual culture
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.
giving people advice
We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!
perfection excellence spirit
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.
challenges world source
The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.
mean understanding doe
Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
learning thinking profound
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.
learning simple attention
John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.
powerful code-quality bells
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?
long trying adequate
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.
thinking naive
Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life.