Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra is doing that sly thing great scientists do when they’re also great stylists: he takes a buzzword everyone nods along to and quietly flips it into an accusation. “Excellence” sounds benign, even noble, but he pegs it as “fashionable” - a signal that the term is social currency, not a technical standard. In his framing, excellence is inherently comparative: you’re excellent because you beat someone else’s benchmark, or because you’re top-ranked in the current season’s metrics. It’s a concept built for markets, prizes, and careers.

“Perfection,” by contrast, is monastic and internal. It isn’t about winning; it’s about eliminating the conditions for failure. Coming from Dijkstra, one of the fiercest advocates for rigor in programming, the subtext is a critique of software culture that treats code like a sport: hackathons, heroic late nights, “good enough” shipped fast. Competitive excellence tolerates edge cases and messiness as collateral damage. Perfection is the refusal to accept that bargain.

The line also smuggles in a moral stance: “non-competitive spirit” isn’t soft; it’s disciplined. Dijkstra is arguing that certain domains - especially those that scale, persist, and can harm people - shouldn’t be optimized for status. He’s allergic to the idea that progress is a leaderboard.

The rhetorical punch is the directional language: “not what we are heading for.” He’s not describing a personal preference; he’s diagnosing a collective drift. It reads like a warning to a field falling in love with performance and forgetting the quieter virtue of correctness.