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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
Difficult
Much
Something
Meta
Explain
Draw
Draws
Design
Easier

More quotes by 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.
Donald Knuth
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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 have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.
Donald Knuth
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Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
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.
Donald Knuth
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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
Donald Knuth
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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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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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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
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Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
Donald Knuth
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It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
Donald Knuth
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I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
Donald Knuth
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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.
Donald Knuth
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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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Beware of bugs in the above code I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth
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The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
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.
Donald Knuth
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I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
Donald Knuth
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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.
Donald Knuth
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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.
Donald Knuth