Quotes

Advice to a promising researcher: "Only do what only you can do."
"The problems of the real world are those that remain when you ignore their known solutions."
"Always design your program as a member of a whole family of programs, including those that are likely to succeed it."
"Avoid operational reasoning like the plague."
"Separate concerns."
"The prisoner falls in love with his chains."
"A programming language is a tool that has a profound influence on our thinking habits."
"I pray daily that more of my fellow programmers may find the means of freeing themselves from the curse of compatibility."
"The program and the correctness proof grow hand in hand."
"Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource."
"In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind."
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."
"For the absence of a bibliography I offer neither explanation nor apology."
"Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code."
"This solution is gloriously non-deterministic."
"Ik hou van wiskunde, maar spaar me de mathematen. [`I love mathematics, it's the mathematicians I cannot stand.']"
"If somewhere you read `in depth', ignore it."
"Nothing is as expensive as making mistakes."
"Program testing can at best show the presence of errors, but never their absence."
"Software Engineering is Programming when you can't."
"We must give industry not what it wants, but what it needs."
"Waiting is a very funny activity: you can't wait twice as fast."
"It helps hand-eye coordination if, as you're doing your formulae, you gently sing the notation."
"Do not try to change the world. Give the world the opportunity to change itself."
"While current curricula extensively teach existing mathematics, they pay scant attention to the doing of mathematics, i.e., to the question of how to design and to present solutions."
"Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding... within a few months, their concept of intellectual culture has acquired a radically new dimension."
"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."
"Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors."
"The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics."
"Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons."
"Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon."
"Maintaining a large range of agilities - mental and physical - requires regular exercise [..]. That is why the capable are always busy."
"Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change."
"And even now my first reaction to formulae, written by someone else, is one of repulsion - in particular when an unfamiliar notational convention is used - and when reading an article, my natural reaction is to skip the formulae."
"Show any mathematician a really elegant argument that is new for him: at the moment it becomes his intellectual property, he starts to laugh!"
"... I had already come to the conclusion that in the practice of computing, where we have so much latitude for making a mess of it, mathematical elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a matter of life and death."
"For me, the first challenge for computing science is to discover how to maintain order in a finite, but very large, discrete universe that is intricately intertwined. And a second, but not less important challenge is how to mould what you have achieved in solving the first problem, into a teachable discipline..."
"Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated."

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Edsger W. Dijkstra

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