Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Donald Knuth - Page 2

It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.

For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.

We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.

These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.

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.

[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.

In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.

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 sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

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.

When certain concepts of TeX are introduced informally, general rules will be stated; afterwards you will find that the rules aren't strictly true. In general, the later chapters contain more reliable information than the earlier ones do. The author feels that this technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. Once you understand a simple but false rule, it will not be hard to supplement that rule with its exceptions.

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

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.

Meta-design is much more difficult than design; it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.

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.

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.