Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra’s line reads like a minimalist coding standard, but it’s really a values statement about power: whoever controls language controls what gets built, who can maintain it, and who gets excluded. “Aim for brevity” is not a plea for cute one-liners; it’s an insistence that thinking should be disciplined enough to fit inside a clear, economical form. Dijkstra came of age when computing was shedding its experimental skin and hardening into an industry. In that moment, verbosity wasn’t just aesthetic clutter; it was a reliability problem. Long-winded explanations and sprawling specifications often mask uncertainty, loopholes, and hand-wavy reasoning.

Then he adds the kicker: “while avoiding jargon.” That clause is where the cultural critique sits. Jargon can compress meaning, but it also manufactures authority. It lets specialists hide weak ideas behind thick vocabulary and turns communication into gatekeeping. Dijkstra, famously skeptical of programming fashions and managerial buzzwords, is warning against mistaking insider language for rigor. He’s implicitly arguing that if you can’t say it plainly, you probably don’t understand it well enough to trust it in a system that will run without mercy at scale.

The sentence works because it sets up a tension that every technical culture feels: brevity can become its own kind of obscurity (cryptic variable names, compressed arguments), while anti-jargon can slide into vagueness. Dijkstra’s intent is to demand the hardest middle path: concise, precise, and shareable language that exposes reasoning rather than decorating it.