Education Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra isn’t merely dunking on an old programming language; he’s staging a moral provocation about how tools shape thought. By calling COBOL “mind-crippling” and its teaching “a criminal offense,” he weaponizes melodrama to make a technical argument feel like a public-health warning. The hyperbole is the point: it forces readers to treat programming languages not as neutral wrappers around logic but as environments that train habits, reward certain mental shortcuts, and punish others.

The subtext is a familiar Dijkstra move: contempt for anything that smuggles imprecision into systems that demand rigor. COBOL, designed for business data processing, is verbose, English-like, and procedural in a way that can encourage programming by accretion: patching, branching, and narrating one’s way through complexity rather than confronting it with clean structure. For Dijkstra, that’s not just ugly style; it’s a pedagogical hazard. If novices learn to equate “readable” with “correct,” or “works today” with “makes sense,” they inherit a culture of software that scales by paperwork instead of proof.

Context matters: this comes from a period when structured programming and formal methods were pitched as antidotes to the so-called software crisis. COBOL also stood for institutional inertia: governments and corporations standardizing on a language because it was already everywhere. Dijkstra’s “criminal” jab targets that conservatism. He’s accusing the industry of reproducing bad thinking at scale, then acting surprised when systems become unmaintainable, error-prone, and expensive to trust.