Top 80 Edsger W. Dijkstra Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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2. “Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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3. “Programming in Basic causes brain damage.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

4. “If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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5. “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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6. “The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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7. “Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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8. “The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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9. “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

10. “Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

11. “The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

12. “Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

13. “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

14. “Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

16. “Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

17. “If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

18. “I don’t need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

19. “A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

20. “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?”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

21. “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

22. “Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

23. “Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

24. “Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

25. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

26. “I would therefore like to posit that computing’s central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

27. “Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

28. “Beauty is our business.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

29. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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30. “Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

31. “Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don’t really know what we are doing.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

32. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

33. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

34. “There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

35. “Thank goodness we don’t have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

36. “Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

37. “Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one’s native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

38. “The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

39. “The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world’s richest source of rewarding challenges.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

40. “Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

41. “The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

42. “FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

43. “Don’t blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

44. “If there is one ‘scientific’ discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

45. “Write a paper promising salvation, make it a structured something or a virtual something, or abstract, distributed or higher-order or applicative and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

46. “The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

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47. “Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

48. “We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

49. “In the good old days physicists repeated each other’s experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other’s programs, bugs included.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

50. “Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that’s what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra