Edsger Dijkstra Quotes
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.
Dijkstra, Edsger W. "In pursuit of simplicity." Edsger W. Dijkstra Archive, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, 1999, p. 3.
About 200 years after Voltaire made this statement, Robert F Kennedy was quoted with a similar notion. See {624825}. However, both of these echo an old Russian proverb. See {615261}.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, science essayist, and pioneer in computing science. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum (Amsterdam) from 1952 to 1962. A university professor for much of his life, Dijkstra held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until his retirement in 1999. He was a professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology (1962–1984) and a research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation (1973–1984). In 1972, he became the first non-American, non-British, and continental European winner of the Turing Award.
