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"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
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"Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."
"You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles... there's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize."
"Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something."
"A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage."
"I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project."
"Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s."
Explore more quotes by Edsger Dijkstra
"The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges."
"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."
"Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons."
"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."
"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."
"If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me."
"Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding."
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