Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure. – Edsger Dijkstra
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. – Edsger Dijkstra
Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning. – Edsger Dijkstra
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. – Edsger Dijkstra
The first purpose of clothes… was not warmth or decency, but ornament…. Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries. – Thomas Carlyle