Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Immortality, for Dijkstra, isn’t a statue or a citation count; it’s a wince. The line is funny because it’s so austere: he reduces legacy to a private moment of hesitation when a programmer is about to cut a corner. No grand philosophy, no sentimental talk about “impact” - just the imagined disapproval of a man famous for treating sloppy thinking as a moral failure.

The intent is half blessing, half warning. Dijkstra is speaking to a culture that routinely rewards “quick and dirty” as pragmatism, especially in software where shipping beats polish and “we’ll refactor later” becomes a lifestyle. His joke lands because every developer knows that feeling: the tiny internal tribunal that convenes when you’re about to do something you’ll regret. He’s offering himself as that conscience, not as an authority figure in a hierarchy but as a mental lint roller for bad habits.

The subtext is that programming is not primarily typing; it’s reasoning under constraints. Dijkstra’s career - from structured programming to his polemical “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” and his meticulous proofs - is a long argument that clarity is a form of safety. Bugs aren’t random; they’re the interest you pay on messy thought.

Context matters: he helped define computer science as a discipline, and disciplines survive by enforcing standards. His “enough immortality” is wryly modest, but it’s also ambitious: to live on as a higher bar inside someone else’s head, precisely at the moment they’re tempted to lower it.