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The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
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
Work
Ingredient
Ingredients
Enjoyment
Essential
Essentials
Tools
Successful
More quotes by Donald Knuth
I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
Donald Knuth
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
Donald Knuth
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
Donald Knuth
I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
Donald Knuth
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Donald Knuth
The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
Donald Knuth
Beware of bugs in the above code I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
Donald Knuth
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.
Donald Knuth
How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
Donald Knuth
I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.
Donald Knuth
