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The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

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
Waste
Paper
Important
Needs
Centrally
Thing
Located
Basket
Baskets
Kitchen

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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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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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How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
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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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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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Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
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The best practice is inspired by theory.
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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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There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
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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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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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Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
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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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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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Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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Beware of bugs in the above code I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
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I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
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It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.
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