“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.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Dijkstra (1970) " Notes On Structured Programming http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD249.PDF" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 6.
1970s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to …" by Edsger W. Dijkstra?

Edsger W. Dijkstra 68

Dutch computer scientist 1930–2002

Related quotes

“For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1960s

“We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Cited in: Michael Jay Quinn (2006) Ethics for the information age. p. 415
The Psychology of Computer Programming, 1971

“To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak of the state of the Art.”

Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist

Source: Computer Programming as an Art (1974), p. 673 [italics in source]

“An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.”

Bjarne Stroustrup book The C++ Programming Language

[Stroustrup, Bjarne, The C++ Programming Language, 713]

“The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 4. The Gene machine

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

https://lwn.net/Articles/193245/

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures….
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. [… ] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

Page 7.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

“I like the observation that Forth is an amplifier: a good programmer can write a great program; a bad programmer a terrible one. I feel no need to cater to bad programmers.”

Charles H. Moore

Quoted in Naomi Hamilton, "The A-Z of Programming Languages: Forth," http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;766897508 Computerworld (2008-06-27)

“Eichmann is 34 or 35 years old, a very active, adventurous man. He felt that this act against Jews was necessary and was fully convinced of its necessity and correctness, as I was.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Rudolf Höss [to Leon Goldensohn, April 9, 1946].

“It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.”

Imre Lakatos (1921–1974) Hungarian mathematician, philosopher

Source: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Volume 1, 1976, p. 68.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Edsger W. Dijkstra 68

Related quotes

Related topics