“The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.” ChallengesScientistComplexityConfusedProgrammingProgrammersComputing Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.” WorldRealChallengesAssumptionProgrammingReal WorldSpeakersInvitationsTacit Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“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?” ProblemLanguagePowerfulWonderfulSolutionsProgrammingBellsFacilityProgrammersProgramming LanguagesCode Quality Book:A Discipline of Programming Source: A Discipline of Programming
“… what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering”.” Would BeCoursesAsksNamesProcessSupportEnvironmentInformationDesignObjectsProjectsModelsManagementOilSellingAnalysisMaturityProgrammingSoftwareEngineeringSnakesImpressiveIntegratedOrientationSoftware EngineeringInformation Systems Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".” PeopleIfsShouldWritingBookProcessSidesTermLinesNumbersProgramProductionsProductivityCodeProgrammingProgrammers Author:Edsger Dijkstra
