Time & Perspective Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra’s line lands like a compliment that turns into a slap: “carried through to perfection” sounds admiring until you realize the perfected object is a “mistake.” That twist is his signature move - the mathematician as moralist, treating programming languages not as neutral tools but as training regimes for the mind. APL, famous for its dense, symbolic notation, becomes his exhibit A: a system so internally consistent, so dazzlingly compressed, that it seduces programmers into believing terseness equals clarity.

The phrase “language of the future for the programming techniques of the past” is the real accusation. He’s not just mocking APL’s glyphs; he’s attacking a style of thinking that treats programming as clever manipulation rather than disciplined construction. In Dijkstra’s universe, “future” should mean better proofs, better structure, better reasoning about correctness. APL offers a futuristic surface while encouraging an older habit: write something opaque that works today and dare tomorrow’s maintainer to decode it.

“Coding bums” is calibrated cruelty. It’s a class insult aimed at the culture APL can enable: virtuoso one-liners, private idioms, code as personal performance. The subtext is political: languages shape communities, and communities shape what gets valued. Dijkstra feared that if you reward cleverness over rigor, you don’t just get messy programs - you breed a profession comfortable with unreadability, and therefore with error. The context is the late-20th-century push to professionalize software engineering, when he was fighting to make “elegance” mean correctness, not stunt work.