Donald Ervin Knuth: Doing

Donald Ervin Knuth is American computer scientist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.

Donald Ervin Knuth: 64 quotes4 likes

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

Donald Ervin Knuth Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Foreword to the book A=B http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html (1996) <br class="br">Source: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

“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.”

Donald Ervin Knuth

Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth http://www.drdobbs.com/an-interview-with-donald-knuth/184409858. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 16-22 (April 1996)

“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.”

Donald Ervin Knuth

Knuth versus Email http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

“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.”

Donald Ervin Knuth Literate Programming

"Literate Programming", The Computer Journal 27 (1984), p. 97. (Reprinted in Literate Programming, 1992, p. 99.)
Literate Programming (1984)

“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.”

Donald Ervin Knuth

[Knuth, Donald, 2002, All Questions Answered, Notices of the AMS, 49, 3, 320, http://www.ams.org/notices/200203/fea-knuth.pdf, PDF]

“To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak of the state of the Art.”

Donald Ervin Knuth

Source: Computer Programming as an Art (1974), p. 673 [italics in source]