Learning Quotes by Edsger Dijkstra

Edsger Dijkstra

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits…. A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

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Edsger Dijkstra

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one’s native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

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Edsger Dijkstra

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent.”

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Edsger Dijkstra

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.

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Edsger Dijkstra

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

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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.

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Edsger Dijkstra

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

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Edsger Dijkstra

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

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Edsger Dijkstra

We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.

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Edsger Dijkstra

Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.

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