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.
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.
Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.
Meta-design is much more difficult than design; it’s easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.
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.
Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...
A mathematical formula should never be “owned” by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.
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 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.
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.
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.
God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.
I’m obsessively detail-oriented.
There’s ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.
I’ve never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.
It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.