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Donald Knuth Quotes
born 1938 United States
Donald Ervin Knuth (born 10 January 1938) is an American computer scientist, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, and winner of the 1974 Turing Award.
United States Academics Composers Computer scientists Educators Also known as: Donald E. Knuth, Knuth, Knuth, Donald
Random Donald Knuth quote
33 quotes
How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
Computer Programming as an Art (1974)
...its very name RANDU is enough to bring dismay into the eyes and stomachs of many computer scientists!
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
Let's face it, if there were 10 people like me in the world, we wouldn't have time to read each other's books.
In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
Literate Programming (1984)
The most important thing in a programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name, and now I am looking for a suitable language.
Most people only know pi in decimal.
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
I am assuming that God exists and I am glad that there is no way to prove this. [Because] I would run through the proof once, and then I'd forget it, and I would never speculate about spiritual things and mysteries otherwise. And, I think, my life would be very incomplete.
If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.
Arturo Gonzalez-Gutierrez (2007)
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