Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra’s jab lands because it’s less a technical claim than a cultural indictment disguised as a one-liner. “Exceptionally bad idea” is deliberately absolutist: it performs impatience with fashion in computing, a field that loves to rename old habits and sell them as inevitable progress. The sting is in the second clause. “Could only have originated in California” isn’t geography; it’s a metonym for a whole late-20th-century ethos: optimism over rigor, product over proof, vibes over verifiability. He’s not just rejecting a paradigm, he’s mocking the social machinery that turns a paradigm into dogma.

Context matters. Dijkstra spent his career pushing for mathematical discipline in programming, arguing that software is too brittle to be built on metaphors that flatter human intuition. Object-oriented programming, with its tidy “real-world” objects and encapsulated behaviors, can feel like a comforting story programmers tell themselves. His subtext: stories are dangerous when they replace clarity. OOP’s promise of reusable components and modular sanity often collapses into sprawling inheritance trees, leaky abstractions, and codebases where the “object model” becomes an ideology you must appease.

The California crack also works as a status play. It needles Silicon Valley’s confidence that engineering problems yield to charismatic frameworks and toolchains. Dijkstra’s worldview treats such confidence as a liability: complexity is not conquered by new vocabulary, but by restraint, explicitness, and proofs of correctness. The line endures because it’s trolling with purpose: a warning that programming cultures can mistake aesthetic coherence for intellectual honesty.