92 Quotes by Edsger W. Dijkstra

Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

Beware of “the real world”. A speaker’s apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.

Beauty is our business.

In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: “the real world”. In Dutch – and I am afraid not in Dutch alone – its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.