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.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
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.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
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.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called ""life"", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
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.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
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.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Edsger Dijkstra in at the ACN South Central Regional Conference, Austin, Texas
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!