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
Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if thats what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it. – Edsger Dijkstra
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. – Edsger Dijkstra
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. – Edsger Dijkstra
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. – Frantz Fanon