Top 80 Edsger W. Dijkstra Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

52. “We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

53. “It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

54. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

55. “Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence. –.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

56. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

57. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

58. “Your obligation is that of active participation. You should not act as knowledge-absorbing sponges, but as whetstones on which we can all sharpen our wits.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

59. “Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

60. “When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

61. “APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

62. “Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

63. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

64. “Don’t compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

65. “The prisoner falls in love with his chains.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

66. “APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

67. “I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

68. “Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

69. “It used to be the program’s purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer’s purpose to execute our programs.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

70. “The use of anthropomorphic terminology forces you linguistically to adopt an operational view. And it makes it practically impossible to argue about programs independently of their being executed.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

71. “The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

72. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

73. “Teaching COBOL ought to be regarded as a criminal act.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

74. “Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

75. “In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

76. “I think of the company advertising “Thought Processors” or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

77. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

78. “In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: “the real world”. In Dutch – and I am afraid not in Dutch alone – its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

79. “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

80. “The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

81. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

82. “Beware of “the real world”. A speaker’s apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

83. “John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

84. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

85. “Mathematicians are like managers – they want improvement without change.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

86. “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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

87. “Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

88. “Programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, boils down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to avoid unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many different concerns.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

89. “In a society in which the educational system is used as an instrument for the establishment of a homogenized culture, in which the cream is prevented from rising to the top, the education of competent programmers could be politically impalatable.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra