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"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
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"I cannot squeeze the stars, but I can squeeze my mind to feel the moon compressed."

"He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of night, where it disappeared. All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees."

"You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that."

"He didn't know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn't care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That's the solution."
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 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."

"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."
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