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Edsger W. Dijkstra
66 quotes
“In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork". For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit". Very.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1175 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1994) "The strengths of the academic enterprise" (EWD 1175).
“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.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1213 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1995) "Introducing a course on calculi" (EWD 1213).
“A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1996) "The next fifty years" (EWD 1243a).
“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1998)
“The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1305 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (2000) "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" (EWD 1305).
“It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1305 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (2000), "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" (EWD 1305).
“There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (2001) Source: Denken als discipline, a program from Dutch public TV broadcaster VPRO from April 10th, 2001 about Dijkstra
“This is generally true: any sizeable piece of program, or even a complete program package, is only a useful tool that can be used in a reliable fashion, provided that the documentation pertinent for the user is much shorter than the program text. If any machine or system requires a very thick manual, its usefulness becomes for that very circumstance subject to doubt!”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After having programmed for some three years, I had a discussion with A. van Wijngaarden, who was then my boss at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, a discussion for which I shall remain grateful to him as long as I live. The point was that I was supposed to study theoretical physics at the University of Leiden simultaneously, and as I found the two activities harder and harder to combine, I had to make up my mind, either to stop programming and become a real, respectable theoretical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to a formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become....., yes what? A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? For after all, what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed. Full of misgivings I knocked on van Wijngaarden's office door, asking him whether I could "speak to him for a moment"; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could. One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer (EWD340).
“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: it does not suffice to hone your own intellect (that will join you in your grave), you must teach others how to hone theirs. The more you concentrate on these two challenges, the clearer you will see that they are only two sides of the same coin: teaching yourself is discovering what is teachable.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1979) My hopes of computing science (EWD 709).
“A confusion of even longer standing came from the fact that the unprepared included the electronic engineers that were supposed to design, build and maintain the machines. The job was actually beyond the electronic technology of the day, and, as a result, the question of how to get and keep the physical equipment more or less in working condition became in the early days the all-overriding concern. As a result, the topic became – primarily in the USA – prematurely known as 'computer science' – which, actually, is like referring to surgery as 'knife science' – and it was firmly implanted in people's minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment. Quod non [Latin: "Which is not true"]. We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipment. We now know that programmable computer is no more and no less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without changing a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is hence a conceptual one, viz., what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1986) On a cultural gap (EWD 924).
“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. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. Since in the US the influence of industry is more pervasive than elsewhere, the above dogma hurts American computing science most. The moral of this sad part of the story is that as long as computing science is not allowed to save the computer industry, we had better see to it that the computer industry does not kill computing science.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 1284 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (1999) "Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges" (EWD 1284).
“What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in '59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dijkstra (2001), in an interview with Philip L. Frana. (OH 330; Communications of the ACM 53(8):41–47)
“In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy......”
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source