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"Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it."
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"The chance that you will become a master in something after the first attempt is neither here nor there. You don't get master's degree by attending school on the first day! Time will tell, so you got to persist!"
"And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another."
"He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."
"The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism."
"The system that aims at educating our boys and girls in the same manner as in the circus where the trainer teaches the lion to sit on a stool, has not understood the true meaning of education itself. Instead of being like a circus where the trainer uses his stick to make animals do stunts to serve the interest of the audience, the system of education should be like an Orchestra where the conductor waves his stick to orchestrate the music already within the musicians' heart in the most beautiful manner. The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus."
Explore more quotes by Edsger Dijkstra
"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians."
"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."
"Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure."
"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."
"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 ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings."
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
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