Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra doesn’t flatter programmers as silicon poets; he frames them as primates with a hard memory limit. The “limited size of his own skull” is blunt biology smuggled into a profession that loves to mythologize brilliance. In one line he collapses the heroic narrative of coding into something more honest: the real bottleneck isn’t the machine, it’s the human trying to keep the whole system in mind without dropping a thread.

The subtext is a rebuke to a certain masculine, merit-badge style of technical culture: the coder who wins by being the cleverest person in the room. Dijkstra’s “humility” isn’t moral virtue signaling; it’s an engineering strategy. If you accept that your cognition is finite, you design for legibility, proof, and constraint. If you don’t, you compensate with stunts: “clever tricks” that feel elegant in the moment and metastasize into future pain when others (or you, six months later) have to debug them.

“Avoids clever tricks like the plague” is pointedly unsentimental. Cleverness spreads: a neat hack becomes a pattern, then a style, then a codebase that requires telepathy. Dijkstra, writing in the era when structured programming and formal reasoning were battles, is protecting software from ego. He’s also protecting programmers from themselves. The sting of the quote is that it treats humility not as personality, but as the only sustainable way to build systems that outlive their authors’ attention spans.