A list is only as strong as its weakest link.
The enjoyment of one’s tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop – it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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.
Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer.
The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn’t make its motion random.
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 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.
In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the T E X project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.
We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
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.
The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.
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.
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.
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.
It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.
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.
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.