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
resources
Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.
rude making-love criticism
So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming.
teaching recovery college
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.
maturity engineering snakes
… what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering”.
humorous disease problem
PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
technology people today
Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
lying long black
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.
responsibility profound influence
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.
people suffering fool
Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.
serious ridiculous problem
Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
thinking profound tools
A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
telescopes computer astronomy
Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.
book writing numbers
In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".
real world problem
The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.