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We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

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
Programming
Root
Roots
Efficiencies
Learning
Optimization
Small
Debugging
Forget
Premature
Evil
Programmers
Time
Efficiency

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Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
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The best practice is inspired by theory.
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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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The best theory is inspired by practice.
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The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
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Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
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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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Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%
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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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Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
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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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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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Beware of bugs in the above code I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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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.
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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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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.
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