Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Taste is not a soft virtue in Dijkstra's universe; it's a hard-edged instrument. When he says that discerning high quality implies identifying shortcomings, he’s dismantling the comforting fantasy that excellence can be recognized through vibes, reputation, or consensus. For Dijkstra, judgment is inseparable from critique: if you can truly see what’s good, you can also see what’s wrong, because both depend on the same mental model of what a thing is supposed to be.

The intent is partly methodological, partly moral. As a computer scientist who spent a career insisting on rigor (in algorithms, proofs, program design), Dijkstra treats "quality" as something structured, not subjective. The subtext is a warning against hollow connoisseurship: people who praise "clean code" or "elegant solutions" without being able to point to the leaky abstraction, the hidden complexity, the unhandled edge case. Admiration without diagnostic precision is just fandom.

Context matters: Dijkstra came up in an era when software was trying to become engineering rather than improvisation. His writing often skewered sloppy thinking and management-friendly optimism. This line fits that stance: it legitimizes negativity as competence, not temperament. Spotting faults isn’t cynicism; it’s the entry fee for making things better.

It also flips the usual power dynamic. In workplaces, the critic is often branded as "not a team player". Dijkstra implies the opposite: the person who can name the shortcomings is the one who actually understands the standard the team claims to care about.