"The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges"
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Dijkstra is smuggling a philosophy of power into a single, almost throwaway phrase: suspicion. Not certainty, not a grand theory, but that nagging itch that a system is more complicated than it needs to be. In computer science, where he helped shape modern programming by insisting on rigor and clarity, “simplified” isn’t a cosmetic preference. It’s an ethical demand. Complexity breeds bugs, hides assumptions, and turns human reasoning into guesswork. Suspicion is the antidote because it treats complexity as guilty until proven innocent.
The line works because it flips the usual romance of difficulty. Many fields valorize the hard problem as inherently noble; Dijkstra treats hardness as a symptom worth interrogating. If something feels tangled, maybe the tangle is self-inflicted: bad abstractions, leaky metaphors, systems accreting features instead of meaning. The “lurking” part matters too. This isn’t the loud optimism of “everything can be simplified,” which is how you get naive reductionism. It’s quiet, persistent, slightly paranoid attention to where the story doesn’t add up.
Calling this suspicion the “richest source” of challenges is also a rebuke to macho innovation culture. The rewarding work isn’t always inventing new machinery; it’s removing the unnecessary machinery so thought can move cleanly again. In Dijkstra’s world, elegance isn’t decoration. It’s the hard-won evidence that you actually understand what you built.
The line works because it flips the usual romance of difficulty. Many fields valorize the hard problem as inherently noble; Dijkstra treats hardness as a symptom worth interrogating. If something feels tangled, maybe the tangle is self-inflicted: bad abstractions, leaky metaphors, systems accreting features instead of meaning. The “lurking” part matters too. This isn’t the loud optimism of “everything can be simplified,” which is how you get naive reductionism. It’s quiet, persistent, slightly paranoid attention to where the story doesn’t add up.
Calling this suspicion the “richest source” of challenges is also a rebuke to macho innovation culture. The rewarding work isn’t always inventing new machinery; it’s removing the unnecessary machinery so thought can move cleanly again. In Dijkstra’s world, elegance isn’t decoration. It’s the hard-won evidence that you actually understand what you built.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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