Quotes
- Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
- Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
- 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.
- 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.
- The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.
- Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
- A mathematical formula should never be 'owned' by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
- I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
- I can't go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
- 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.
- An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
- The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
- Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.
- A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
- 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.
- 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.
donald knuth
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