Edsger Dijkstra

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning. ”

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. ”

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. ”

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges. ”

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. ”

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics. ”

Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons. ”

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. ”

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. ”