"Write a paper promising salvation, make it a structured something or a virtual something, or abstract, distributed or higher-order or applicative and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult."
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, mathematician, and science essayist.
"Automatic computers have now been with us for a quarter of a century. They have had a great impact on our society in their capacity of tools, but in that capacity their influence will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture, compared with the much more profound influence they will have in their capacity of intellectual challenge without precedent in the cultural history of mankind."
Edsger W. 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."
Edsger W. Dijkstra"You probably know that arrogance, in computer science, is measured in nanodijkstras."
Edsger W. Dijkstra"The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible."
Edsger W. Dijkstra"Please dont fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!"
Edsger W. Dijkstra"When we take the position that it is not only the programmers responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmers activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured."
Edsger W. Dijkstra