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I Would Therefore Like To Posit That Computing's Central Challenge, How Not To Make A Mess Of It, Has Not Yet Been Met.
-Edsger Dijkstra
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I Would Therefore Like

Edsger Dijkstra
...
I Would Therefore Like To Posit That Computing's Central Challenge, How Not To Make A Mess Of It, Has Not Yet Been Met.

Understanding the Quote: "i would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not..."

This quote by Edsger Dijkstra reflects deeply on the theme of challenges. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Challenges, Mets, Mess, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Edsger Dijkstra interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Edsger Dijkstra

Edsger Dijkstra is celebrated for insightful thoughts on challenges and mets. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Challenges
Mets
Mess
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Computer Science Has As Much To Do With Computers As Astronomy Has To Do With Telescopes.
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Don't Compete With Me: Firstly, I Have More Experience, And Secondly, I Have Chosen The Weapons.
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I Now Have Had My Foggy Crystal Ball For Quite A Long Time. Its Predictions Are Invariably Gloomy And Usually Correct, But I Am Quite Used To That And They Won't Keep Me From Giving You A Few Suggestions, Even If It Is Merely An Exercise In Futility Whose Only Effect Is To Make You Feel Guilty.
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When I Came Back From Munich, It Was September, And I Was Professor Of Mathematics At The Eindhoven University Of Technology. Later I Learned That I Had Been The Department's Third Choice, After Two Numerical Analysts Had Turned The Invitation Down; The Decision To Invite Me Had Not Been An Easy One, On The One Hand Because I Had Not Really Studied Mathematics, And On The Other Hand Because Of My Sandals, My Beard And My "arrogance" (whatever That May Be).
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In Passing I Draw Attention To Another English Expression Which Often Occurs In Dutch Texts: "the Real World". In Dutch - And I Am Afraid Not In Dutch Alone - Its Usage Is Almost Always A Symptom Of A Violent Anti-intellectualism.
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Brainpower Is By Far Our Scarcest Resource.
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Mentally Mutilated Potential Programmers Beyond Hope Of Regeneration.
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Perfecting Oneself Is As Much Unlearning As It Is Learning.
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In Their Capacity As A Tool, Computers Will Be But A Ripple On The Surface Of Our Culture. In Their Capacity As Intellectual Challenge, They Are Without Precedent In The Cultural History Of Mankind.
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Simplicity And Elegance Are Unpopular Because They Require Hard Work And Discipline To Achieve And Education To Be Appreciated.
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Too Few People Recognize That The High Technology So Celebrated Today Is Essentially A Mathematical Technology.
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...simplifications Have Had A Much Greater Long-range Scientific Impact Than Individual Feats Of Ingenuity. The Opportunity For Simplification Is Very Encouraging, Because In All Examples That Come To Mind The Simple And Elegant Systems Tend To Be Easier And Faster To Design And Get Right, More Efficient In Execution, And Much More Reliable Than The More Contrived Contraptions That Have To Be Debugged Into Some Degree Of Acceptability....simplicity And Elegance Are Unpopular Because They Require Hard Work And Discipline To Achieve And Education To Be Appreciated.
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In The Software Business There Are Many Enterprises For Which It Is Not Clear That Science Can Help Them; That Science Should Try Is Not Clear Either.
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Are You Quite Sure That All Those Bells And Whistles, All Those Wonderful Facilities Of Your So Called Powerful Programming Languages, Belong To The Solution Set Rather Than The Problem Set?
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In The Wake Of The Cultural Revolution And Now Of The Recession I Observe A Mounting Pressure To Co-operate And To Promote "teamwork." For Its Anti-individualistic Streak, Such A Drive Is Of Course Highly Suspect; Some People May Not Be So Sensitive To It, But Having Seen The Hitlerjugend In Action Suffices For The Rest Of Your Life To Be Very Wary Of "team Spirit." Very.
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Some Consider The Puzzles That Are Created By Their Omissions As Spicy Challenges, Without Which Their Texts Would Be Boring; Others Shun Clarity Lest Their Work Is Considered Trivial.
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[though Computer Science Is A Fairly New Discipline, It Is Predominantly Based On The Cartesian World View. As Edsgar W. Dijkstra Has Pointed Out] A Scientific Discipline Emerges With The - Usually Rather Slow! - Discovery Of Which Aspects Can Be Meaningfully 'studied' In Isolation For The Sake Of Their Own Consistency.
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Beware Of "the Real World". A Speaker's Apeal To It Is Always An Invitation Not To Challenge His Tacit Assumptions.
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Aim For Brevity While Avoiding Jargon.
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Elegance Is Not A Dispensable Luxury But A Factor That Decides Between Success And Failure.
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The Required Techniques Of Effective Reasoning Are Pretty Formal, But As Long As Programming Is Done By People That Don't Master Them, The Software Crisis Will Remain With Us And Will Be Considered An Incurable Disease. And You Know What Incurable Diseases Do: They Invite The Quacks And Charlatans In, Who In This Case Take The Form Of Software Engineering Gurus.
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It Is A Mistake To Think That Programmers Wares Are Programs. Programmers Have To Produce Trustworthy Solutions And Present It In The Form Of Cogent Arguments. Programs Source Code Is Just The Accompanying Material To Which These Arguments Are To Be Applied To.
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Raise Your Quality Standards As High As You Can Live With, Avoid Wasting Your Time On Routine Problems, And Always Try To Work As Closely As Possible At The Boundary Of Your Abilities. Do This, Because It Is The Only Way Of Discovering How That Boundary Should Be Moved Forward.
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The Purpose Of Abstraction Is Not To Be Vague, But To Create A New Semantic Level In Which One Can Be Absolutely Precise.
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How Do We Convince People That In Programming Simplicity And Clarity - In Short: What Mathematicians Call Elegance - Are Not A Dispensable Luxury, But A Crucial Matter That Decides Between Success And Failure?
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There Is Very Little Point In Trying To Urge The World To Mend Its Ways As Long As That World Is Still Convinced That Its Ways Are Perfectly Adequate.
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John Von Neumann Draws Attention To What Seemed To Him A Contrast. He Remarked That For Simple Mechanisms, It Is Often Easier To Describe How They Work Than What They Do, While For More Complicated Mechanisms, It Is Usually The Other Way Around.
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Programming Is One Of The Most Difficult Branches Of Applied Mathematics; The Poorer Mathematicians Had Better Remain Pure Mathematicians.
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The Ability Of Discerning High Quality Unavoidably Implies The Ability Of Identifying Shortcomings.
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Write A Paper Promising Salvation, Make It A "structured" Something Or A "virtual" Something, Or "abstract," "distributed" Or "higher-order" Or "applicative" And You Can Almost Be Certain Of Having Started A New Cult.
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The Competent Programmer Is Fully Aware Of The Strictly Limited Size Of His Own Skull; Therefore He Approaches The Programming Task In Full Humility, And Among Other Things He Avoids Clever Tricks Like The Plague.
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In The Good Old Days Physicists Repeated Each Other's Experiments, Just To Be Sure. Today They Stick To Fortran, So That They Can Share Each Other's Programs, Bugs Included.
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Besides A Mathematical Inclination, An Exceptionally Good Mastery Of One's Native Tongue Is The Most Vital Asset Of A Competent Programmer.
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Yes, I Share Your Concern: How To Program Well -though A Teachable Topic- Is Hardly Taught. The Situation Is Similar To That In Mathematics, Where The Explicit Curriculum Is Confined To Mathematical Results; How To Do Mathematics Is Something The Student Must Absorb By Osmosis, So To Speak. One Reason For Preferring Symbol-manipulating, Calculating Arguments Is That Their Design Is Much Better Teachable Than The Design Of Verbal/pictorial Arguments. Large-scale Introduction Of Courses On Such Calculational Methodology, However, Would Encounter Unsurmoutable Political Problems.
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The Prisoner Falls In Love With His Chains.
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When We Take The Position That It Is Not Only The Programmer's Responsibility To Produce A Correct Program But Also To Demonstrate Its Correctness In A Convincing Manner, Then The Above Remarks Have A Profound Influence On The Programmer's Activity: The Object He Has To Produce Must Be Usefully Structured.
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Lisp Has Jokingly Been Described As "the Most Intelligent Way To Misuse A Computer." I Think That Description Is A Great Compliment Because It Transmits The Full Flavour Of Liberation: It Has Assisted A Number Of Our Most Gifted Fellow Humans In Thinking Previously Impossible Thoughts.
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We Shall Do A Much Better Programming Job, Provided That We Approach The Task With A Full Appreciation Of Its Tremendous Difficulty, Provided That We Stick To Modest And Elegant Programming Languages, Provided That We Respect The Intrinsic Limitations Of The Human Mind And Approach The Task As Very Humble Programmers.
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... As A Slow-witted Human Being I Have A Very Small Head And I Had Better Learn To Live With It And To Respect My Limitations And Give Them Full Credit, Rather Than To Try To Ignore Them, For The Latter Vain Effort Will Be Punished By Failure.
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I Would Therefore Like To Posit That Computing's Central Challenge, How Not To Make A Mess Of It, Has Not Yet Been Met.
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If In Physics There's Something You Don't Understand, You Can Always Hide Behind The Uncharted Depths Of Nature. You Can Always Blame God. You Didn't Make It So Complex Yourself. But If Your Program Doesn't Work, There Is No One To Hide Behind. You Cannot Hide Behind An Obstinate Nature. If It Doesn't Work, You've Messed Up.
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… What Society Overwhelmingly Asks For Is Snake Oil. Of Course, The Snake Oil Has The Most Impressive Names — Otherwise You Would Be Selling Nothing — Like “structured Analysis And Design”, “software Engineering”, “maturity Models”, “management Information Systems”, “integrated Project Support Environments” “object Orientation” And “business Process Re-engineering”.
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Many Mathematicians Derive Part Of Their Self-esteem By Feeling Themselves The Proud Heirs Of A Long Tradition Of Rational Thinking; I Am Afraid They Idealize Their Cultural Ancestors.
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Long
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The Question Of Whether Computers Can Think Is Like The Question Of Whether Submarines Can Swim.
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Mathematicians Are Like Managers - They Want Improvement Without Change.
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Teaching Cobol Ought To Be Regarded As A Criminal Act.
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A Programming Language Is A Tool That Has Profound Influence On Our Thinking Habits.
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Thank Goodness We Don't Have Only Serious Problems, But Ridiculous Ones As Well.
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About The Use Of Language: It Is Impossible To Sharpen A Pencil With A Blunt Axe. It Is Equally Vain To Try To Do It With Ten Blunt Axes Instead.
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The Tools We Use Have A Profound And Devious Influence On Our Thinking Habits, And Therefore On Our Thinking Abilities.
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Learning
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I Mean, 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.
Dirty
Mean
Years
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Believe
Fall
Simple
The Problems Of The Real World Are Primarily Those You Are Left With When You Refuse To Apply Their Effective Solutions.
Real
World
Problem
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