Quote

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.

Donald Knuth

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Donald Knuth
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: January 10
Academic
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Historian Of Mathematics
Mathematician
Programmer
University Teacher
Writer
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Donald E. Knuth
Don Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth
D.E.K.
DEK
Knuth
Learning
Main
Explaining
Rather
Traditional
Concentrate
Tasks
Programs
Change
Program
Construction
Human
Computer
Programming
Humans
Beings
Software
Instead
Task
Instruct
Attitude
Simplicity
Imagining

More quotes by Donald Knuth

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I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
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I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.
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AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder.
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The best practice is inspired by theory.
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People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
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Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.
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An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
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By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method it is much closer to reality.
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Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
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My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.
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The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
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It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
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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.
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Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
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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.
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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.
Donald Knuth
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Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
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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
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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.
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Meta-design is much more difficult than design it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.
Donald Knuth