… what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive … - Edsger Dijkstra

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When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.

Edsger Dijkstra

… 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”.

Maturity, Names, Object, Snakes, Systems

Same Author Quotes

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Funny, Bugs, Debugging, Process, Removing

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Simplicity, Design, Purpose, Semantic, Abstraction

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

Hard Work, Discipline, Simplicity, Hard, Achieve

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?

Bells, Code Quality, Powerful, Programming, Set

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.

Abilities, Boundary, Possible, Quality, Routine, Trying