"About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead"
About this Quote
Dijkstra’s line lands like a dry slap: a humble pencil, a comically wrong tool, and then the modern punchline - scale doesn’t redeem incompetence. The image is domestic and physical, which is exactly why it works for a scientist arguing about something as abstract as language. He’s smuggling a philosophy of rigor into a kitchen-table metaphor: precision isn’t decorative; it’s the instrument.
The specific intent is a warning to technologists who treat language as an afterthought. In Dijkstra’s world, sloppy terms don’t just make ugly prose; they produce broken thinking. If you can’t name concepts cleanly, you can’t manipulate them reliably, and you certainly can’t build systems that behave. “Sharpen a pencil” is also a wink at computation itself: the point of a pencil is to make fine marks, not broad strokes. Programming, like writing, rewards fine distinctions.
The subtext takes aim at two enduring managerial fantasies. First: brute force can substitute for craft. Second: adding more people (or more meetings, or more documentation churn) will fix a problem rooted in unclear definitions. Ten blunt axes is Dijkstra’s satire of committee logic, the belief that multiplication of bad tools yields progress.
Context matters: Dijkstra spent his career policing the boundaries of clear reasoning in computing, from structured programming to critiques of “go fast and patch later” culture. Read now, it also anticipates the age of scale-at-all-costs software: distributed systems, sprawling codebases, and teams that expand faster than their shared vocabulary. The line is less about pedantry than about safety: when the tool is language, dullness cuts deepest.
The specific intent is a warning to technologists who treat language as an afterthought. In Dijkstra’s world, sloppy terms don’t just make ugly prose; they produce broken thinking. If you can’t name concepts cleanly, you can’t manipulate them reliably, and you certainly can’t build systems that behave. “Sharpen a pencil” is also a wink at computation itself: the point of a pencil is to make fine marks, not broad strokes. Programming, like writing, rewards fine distinctions.
The subtext takes aim at two enduring managerial fantasies. First: brute force can substitute for craft. Second: adding more people (or more meetings, or more documentation churn) will fix a problem rooted in unclear definitions. Ten blunt axes is Dijkstra’s satire of committee logic, the belief that multiplication of bad tools yields progress.
Context matters: Dijkstra spent his career policing the boundaries of clear reasoning in computing, from structured programming to critiques of “go fast and patch later” culture. Read now, it also anticipates the age of scale-at-all-costs software: distributed systems, sprawling codebases, and teams that expand faster than their shared vocabulary. The line is less about pedantry than about safety: when the tool is language, dullness cuts deepest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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