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"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."
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"We must never confuse elegance with snobbery."
"Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself."
"Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony."
"Elegance is a glowing inner peace. Grace is an ability to give as well as to receive and be thankful. Mystery is a hidden laugh always ready to surface! Glamour only radiates if there is a sublime courage & bravery within: glamour is like the moon, it only shines because the sun is there."
"If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!"
"What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?"
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."
"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."
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
"Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California."
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