Education Quote by Edsger Dijkstra

Dijkstra lands the point like a clean proof: if elegance is rare, it is not because humans are incapable of recognizing beauty, but because beauty is expensive. The line is framed as a question, then immediately denied the comfort of speculation: "That is the reality of it". He is stripping the romance out of "elegant solutions" and replacing it with a blunt cost model: effort to produce, literacy to enjoy.

Coming from a computer scientist who spent his career preaching disciplined thinking, the subtext is a quiet indictment of both sides of the marketplace. Creators dodge elegance because it demands time, restraint, and the kind of rigor that cannot be faked by confidence or speed. Audiences dismiss it because appreciating elegance requires training: you have to know what was avoided, what was simplified, what was proven. Without that education, elegance can look like underwhelming simplicity, not hard-won compression.

There's also an implicit critique of institutions. If elegance needs "a good education to appreciate it", then a culture that undervalues education will predictably overvalue loudness, complexity, and cargo-cult sophistication. In programming terms: feature bloat beats a small, correct program; clever hacks beat invariants; performance theater beats clarity. Dijkstra isn't being precious about aesthetics. He's arguing that elegance is a moral and cognitive achievement, and that its unpopularity is a symptom of how we allocate prestige: we reward what is immediately legible, not what is deeply right.