In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.
Edsger DijkstraRaise 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.
Edsger DijkstraI don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
Edsger DijkstraIn this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".
Edsger Dijkstra