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...
technology thinking swim
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.
brain damage causes
Programming in Basic causes brain damage.
challenges intellectual culture
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.
mean understanding doe
Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
long trying adequate
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.
thinking naive
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.
powerful machines computer
When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
beach watches tides
When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide.
humorous disease problem
PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
lying long black
A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.
thinking profound tools
A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
telescopes computer astronomy
Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.
appreciate ingredients steps
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.
wise learning space
...our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.