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Edsger Dijkstra

Edsger Dijkstra Quotes

Computer Scientist

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Famous Edsger Dijkstra Quotes

“We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.”

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Author:Edsger Dijkstra
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“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.”

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Author:Edsger Dijkstra
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“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.”

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Book:Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective
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“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.”

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Book:Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective
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“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".”

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Author:Edsger Dijkstra
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