Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

A threat dressed up as etiquette: Dijkstra’s line lands because it sounds like advice while quietly asserting total control. “Don’t compete with me” isn’t a plea for harmony; it’s a boundary marker in a field that likes to pretend it’s an even playing ground. The two reasons that follow do the real work. “I have more experience” is the respectable credential, the one academia and engineering will nod along to. “I have chosen the weapons” is the reveal: competitions aren’t neutral, they’re designed.

Dijkstra, a famously exacting computer scientist with little patience for sloppy thinking, is pointing at a cultural trick inside technical communities: we talk about “best ideas winning,” but the rules of winning are often set by whoever frames the problem, defines what counts as elegance, or selects the metrics. Choose the battlefield and you can make your strengths look like objective truth. It’s rhetoric as systems design: constrain inputs, and you constrain outcomes.

The subtext is also about craft. Experience isn’t just seniority; it’s accumulated intuition for where arguments break, where proofs hide, where programs fail. By calling methods “weapons,” he treats intellectual work as conflict, not consensus - a jab at the sentimental view of science as pure cooperation. Coming from Dijkstra, it reads less like swagger than a warning: before you challenge an expert, notice who wrote the test, and what the test is actually measuring.