Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuthis an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth10 January 1938
CountryUnited States of America
achievement both complexity composing consistent emotional establish experience feeling master poetry prepare system
My feeling is that when we prepare a program, the experience can be just like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said, programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.
numbers method should
Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
engineering algorithms computer-science
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
computer program humans
Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.
funny-inspirational reading following-instructions
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
roots evil debugging
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
funny-inspirational bugs computer
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
numbers world
How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
nice science reality
It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.
best-practices practice inspired
The best practice is inspired by theory.
levels psychological lows
The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
nice house important
The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.
expression definitions unix
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
mistake errors trying
My first program taught me a lot about the errors that I was going to be making in the future, and also about how to find errors. That's sort of the story of my life, making errors and trying to recover from them. I try to get things correct. I probably obsess about not making too many mistakes.