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

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
Designer
Fully
Design
System
Must
Kind
Implementation
Participate
Software

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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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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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I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
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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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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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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 can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
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I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
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An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
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The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
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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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There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
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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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We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
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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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A mathematical formula should never be owned by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
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Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
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Beware of bugs in the above code I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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