Donald Knuth Quotes
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How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
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Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.
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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 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
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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.
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We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
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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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Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
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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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Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
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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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The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.
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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.
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The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.
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The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
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Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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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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I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
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A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
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Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.
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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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Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.
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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.
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Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.
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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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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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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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...One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.
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[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.
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God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
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