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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Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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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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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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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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I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
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If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
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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 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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God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
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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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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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I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
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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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I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
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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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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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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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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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There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
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People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
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Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random