“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.” ThinkingShouldMindHelpingCompanyTeachingCollegeCriminalsRecoveryAdvertisingPretendingOffenceProcessors Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide.” ShouldWatchesBuildingWaveBeachSandTidesCastlesSand Castle Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“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.” ShouldMotivationalSufferingIndividualCompanyIndustryIndependentSakeEmployeeStabilityDogmaCompetenceContinuity Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“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.” ShouldTryingHelpingClearEnterpriseSoftware Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“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.” WayShouldTryingProblemAbilityQualityStandardsRaisesMovedBoundariesRoutineDiscoveringWasting Your Time Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” ShouldMindUseTechnologyTeachingComputerHumorousWittyCriminalsProgrammingOffenseProgrammersComputer ProgrammingComputer ScienceProgramming LanguagesComputer LanguageCripplesComputer ProgrammersProgramming FunnyComputer HackingCobol Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."” IfsShouldWishLinesLearningComputerRegardCodeProgrammingComputer Programming Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.” ShouldMathematicsBoring Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“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.” ShouldReasonProcessSpaceLearningWiseMastersIntellectualProgramRelationSpreadLimitationEvolveProgrammingGapsProgrammersStaticCorrespondence Author:Edsger Dijkstra
“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.” IfsWantShouldWasteProgrammingIntroducingBugsProgrammersDebugging 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
