A biography for Edsger Dijkstrahasn’t been written yet.
“Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!”
“Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.”
“Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.”
“About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.”
“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.”
“The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.”
“There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.”
“Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”
“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”
“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.”
“Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.”
“Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.”
“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.”
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.”
“APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.”
“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
“Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.”
“The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.”