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Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
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
Mind
Instructions
Good
Computing
Computers
Instruction
Programming
Following
Computer
Reading
More quotes by Donald Knuth
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
Donald Knuth
There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
Donald Knuth
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
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.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
Donald Knuth
I think people who write programs do have at least a glimmer of extra insight into the nature of God... because creating a program often means that you have to create a small universe
Donald Knuth
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
Donald Knuth
A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
Donald Knuth
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
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.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
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
Donald Knuth
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
Donald Knuth
It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
Donald Knuth
