Donald Knuth Quotes - Page 3

I'm obsessively detail-oriented.

I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.

[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.

Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.

TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler

When certain concepts of TeX are introduced informally, general rules will be stated; afterwards you will find that the rules aren't strictly true. In general, the later chapters contain more reliable information than the earlier ones do. The author feels that this technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. Once you understand a simple but false rule, it will not be hard to supplement that rule with its exceptions.

The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.

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.

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

Meta-design is much more difficult than design; it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.

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.

I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.

I can't be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It's at that level.

There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.

We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.

The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.

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.