Words matter. These are the best Donald Knuth Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
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.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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.
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.
In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That’s what really advances the field.
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.
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.
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!
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.
There’s ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
I’ve never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
I’m obsessively detail-oriented.
If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.
