92 Quotes by Edsger W. Dijkstra

The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.

I mean, 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.

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

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

It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits.

The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.