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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

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
Write
Program
Inspirational
Creating
Nature
Least
Mean
Create
Glimmer
Writing
Small
Programs
Think
Universe
Extra
Thinking
Means
Extras
People
Often
Insight

More quotes by Donald Knuth

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There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
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How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
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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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Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
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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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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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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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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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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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An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
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The best practice is inspired by theory.
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I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
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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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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
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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'm obsessively detail-oriented.
Donald Knuth
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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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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.
Donald Knuth
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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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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.
Donald Knuth