Quote

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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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
Levels
Programmers
Small
Abstraction
High
Shift
Ability
Mostly
Something
Psychological
Lows
Large
Profiling
Level
Programmer

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The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.
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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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The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
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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
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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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Meta-design is much more difficult than design it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.
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I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.
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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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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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Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
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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.
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I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
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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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If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things it will improve your practice.
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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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How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
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People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones.
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The best practice is inspired by theory.
Donald Knuth
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A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
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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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