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The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

Edsger Dijkstra
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Elegance
Mathematics
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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.
Edsger Dijkstra
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Edsger Dijkstra
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings.
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
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
Edsger Dijkstra
The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.
Edsger Dijkstra
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
Edsger Dijkstra
There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
Edsger Dijkstra
Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.
Edsger Dijkstra
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
Edsger Dijkstra
Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
Edsger Dijkstra
Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding.
Edsger Dijkstra
Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.
Edsger Dijkstra
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Edsger Dijkstra
Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.
Edsger Dijkstra
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.
Edsger Dijkstra
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
Edsger Dijkstra
Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
Edsger Dijkstra
Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
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
The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.
Edsger Dijkstra
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
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.
Edsger Dijkstra
Mathematicians are like managers they want improvement without change.
Edsger Dijkstra
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Edsger Dijkstra
If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent.
Edsger Dijkstra
The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.
Diana Vreeland
Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.
Patricia Highsmith
A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.
Abba Eban
Isn't elegance forgetting what one is wearing?
Yves Saint Laurent
Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.
Benjamin Disraeli
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
Albert Einstein
What is elegance? Soap and water!
Cecil Beaton
About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.
Sidney Altman
The only thing I was trying to portray was serenity. Also, innocence, vulnerability and elegance.
Sylvia Kristel
I believe that the Apple Shuffle is an excellent compromise among the conflicting requirements of simplicity, elegance, size, battery life, and function.
Donald Norman
Nothing surpasses the beauty and elegance of a bad idea.
Craig Bruce
I am from the planet of elegance.
Ron Carter
Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.
Edsger Dijkstra
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Marcel Proust
The elegance of honesty needs no adornment.
Merry Browne
Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.
Coco Chanel
Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.
Diana Vreeland
If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!
Johnny Ball