92 Quotes by Edsger W. Dijkstra

Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

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

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.

The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.

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.

I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

The use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible to argue about programs independently of their being executed.