92 Quotes by Edsger W. Dijkstra

It is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

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.

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?

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.

Don’t compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.