106 Quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

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.

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.

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.

Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

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

The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.