A few quotes attributed to him

Posted Aug 7, 2002 21:18 UTC (Wed) by nas (subscriber, #17)
Parent article: Edsger Dijkstra

"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague" (from 1972 Turing Award Lecture)

"Program testing can best show the presence of errors but never their absence"

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

"If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not start writing it."

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."

"The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."