Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra; 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrumfrom 1952 to 1962. He was a professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technologyand a research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation. He held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 1999, and retired as Professor Emeritus in 1999...
people half four
Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor of four; probably it is worse.
inspirational inspiring simplicity
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
hard-work discipline simplicity
Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
want improvement mathematician
Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.
luxury people simplicity
How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
stupid axes trying
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.
mistake thinking argument
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.
trying quality routine
Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.
purpose computer program
It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.
bugs absence programming
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
quality ability identifying
The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
learning ideas california
Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
wish lines computer
If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent.'
discovery views discipline
[Though computer science is a fairly new discipline, it is predominantly based on the Cartesian world view. As Edsgar W. Dijkstra has pointed out] A scientific discipline emerges with the - usually rather slow! - discovery of which aspects can be meaningfully 'studied in isolation for the sake of their own consistency.