Zitat des Tages von Donald Knuth:
God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
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.
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.
I'm obsessively detail-oriented.
If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
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.
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
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.
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.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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.