I hate you, Edsger Dijkstra!

And why exactly wouldn’t programmers want their chains pulled? Surely programmers must have the longest and sturdiest and clankiest chains in the biz. They said so on the mailing list. Is getting your chain pulled CONSIDERED HARMFUL? Ohhhhh no!

But here I quote from Edsger Dijkstra, the father of CONSIDERED HARMFUL, who once said:

    Two opinions about programming date from those days. I mention them now, I shall return to them later. The one opinion was that a really competent programmer should be puzzle-minded and very fond of clever tricks; the other opinon was that programming was nothing more than optimizing the efficiency of the computational process, in one direction or the other.

Two opinions, eh? One must be correct! And I, Edsger Dijkstra, will decide! We must finish with the neutrality of programming once and for all! We must organize shockbrigades of programmers, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for programming!

From the same essay, his popular saying:

    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.

So it’s all hogwash. The very thing which draws you to programming is your undoing. Unless you are it’s undoing. I hate you, Edsger Dijkstra!

Makes you wonder if programming made him mad,
or he was mad to begin with and programming seemed cool to him.

Edsger Dijkstra: the Algol60 Zed Shaw

This is the philosophy that I have developed on my own accord before learning about it right now. Great minds do think alike!

>>4
And so do you and Dijkstra!

That's a very pragmatic attitude, appropriate when you're working on large real-world systems. But Dijkstra did a lot of theoretical groundwork, and as far as I have heard, shunned computers for his personal use.
Hard to peg, yet always ready to peg others. Maybe he just wanted some certainty in life, like everyone else.