Science Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra is picking a fight with a whole genre of “it works, ship it” thinking, and he does it by smuggling an aesthetic demand into what many people treat as a neutral, mechanical discipline. The word “traditional” is bait: it flatters insiders who already fancy themselves connoisseurs, then raises the stakes by turning their private taste into a public rule. Elegance isn’t a garnish you notice after the fact; it’s a criterion of legitimacy. If it’s clumsy, it doesn’t merely need revision - it gets exiled from the category itself.

The intent is polemical, but the subtext is disciplinary. Dijkstra is defending a culture of rigor against the creeping normalization of messy hacks, ad hoc proofs, and software held together by duct tape and optimism. Coming from a computer scientist who was famously impatient with slapdash programming, “mathematics” here doubles as an ideal for how we should build systems: clean abstractions, minimal assumptions, proofs you can read without wincing.

Context matters: late 20th-century computing was exploding in power and reach while often shrinking in intellectual humility. Dijkstra’s line draws a boundary in the sand, insisting that complexity is not a badge of realism; it’s frequently a symptom of weak thought. The rhetorical trick is the ultimatum. By redefining “mathematics” as the clumsy-free zone, he pressures the reader to treat elegance not as elitism, but as ethics: clarity as a duty, not a luxury.