Edsger W. Dijkstra

"Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life."

"The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."

"May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom."

"A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box."

"Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and ... our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do our utmost…"

"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 st…"

"My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on th…"

"I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: i…"