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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.

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
Draws
Design
Easier
Difficult
Much
Something
Meta
Explain
Draw

More quotes by Donald Knuth

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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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How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
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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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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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I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
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Beware of bugs in the above code I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
Donald Knuth
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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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Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
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The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
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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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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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I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
Donald Knuth
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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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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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A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
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The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
Donald Knuth
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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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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.
Donald Knuth
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I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
Donald Knuth