Edsger W. Dijkstra
Dutch computer scientist (1930 to 2002); received the Turing Award in 1972; held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 1999; wrote a numbered series of manuscripts known as the EWDs.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
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Their wordsin computing, elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure
↗Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges (EWD1284)cs.utexas.edu 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordswe know that for the sake of reliability and intellectual control we have to keep the design simple and disentangled, and in individual cases we have been remarkably successful, but we do not know how to reach simplicity in a systematic manner.
↗Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges (EWD1284)cs.utexas.edu 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 15 years earlier
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Our reading
Simplicity takes hard work to achieve and education to appreciate, and complexity sells better.
Their wordsSimplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
↗On the nature of Computing Science (EWD896)cs.utexas.edu 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsOne can get credit for some complicated concepts one has introduced, it is hard to get credit for the discovery how some established but complicated concepts had better be avoided
↗On the nature of Computing Science (EWD896)cs.utexas.edu 2nd of 2 in this piece