[goto11]

Here he is talking about humility in the act of writing code, by recognizing the limits of the minds capacity and therefore keeping the code simple to understand rather than clever.

He wasn't particularly humble in his writings.

[username90]

Why would clever code be hard to use? Dijkstra talked about messy code, there is nothing wrong with clever code. Algorithms are very clever, but they are self contained and therefore easy to read and reason about and therefore not a problem. Trying to achieve the same things without being clever will just create a mess.

[goto11]

The article literally quotes Dijkstra for saying:

> The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.