Donald Knuth Quotes
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I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level.
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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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Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the T
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Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...
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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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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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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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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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If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
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The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
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I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
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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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God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
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The psychological profiling of a programmer is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
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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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There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
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I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
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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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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 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.
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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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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 eachother, like a wall of mini stones.
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Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random