Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra’s line lands like an engineer’s moral axiom, and it’s meant to. “Simplicity” here isn’t a lifestyle aesthetic; it’s a hard-won constraint in a field where every extra moving part is another place for reality to break your promises. By calling simplicity a “prerequisite,” he’s rejecting the comforting belief that reliability can be bolted on later with testing, monitoring, or heroics. Reliability, in his worldview, is designed in at the level of structure.

The subtext is a critique of macho complexity: the programmer as wizard, the system as baroque cathedral, the codebase as proof of genius. Dijkstra spent his career pushing against that romance, arguing that complexity is not neutral - it’s compounding debt that eventually becomes unpayable. The line also smuggles in an ethical claim: unreliable software isn’t just inconvenient, it’s irresponsible. If you can’t reason about a system, you can’t honestly claim control over it.

Context matters. Dijkstra wrote during the maturation of computer science, when software was shifting from clever hacks to infrastructure. His famous polemics against “go to” statements and his insistence on formal reasoning weren’t pedantry; they were attempts to make software behave like engineering rather than folklore. The quote works because it’s both practical and accusatory: if your system can’t be reliable, odds are you built it to be impressive, not understandable.