Donald Knuth Quotes

Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.

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.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

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 each other, like a wall of mini stones.

AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder.

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

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 have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.

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.

The best theory is inspired by practice.

I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler

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.

I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.

The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

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

A list is only as strong as its weakest link.

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.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.

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

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

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

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

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.

It is much more rewarding to do more with less.

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

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

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.

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.

Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.

I'm obsessively detail-oriented.

I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.

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

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.

There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.

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

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 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.

God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.