“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.”

— Donald Ervin Knuth , book The Art of Computer Programming

Vol. I Fasc. 1, "MMIX, a RISC computer for the new millennium"
The Art of Computer Programming (1968–2011)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardwar…" by Donald Ervin Knuth?

Donald Ervin Knuth 32

American computer scientist 1938

Related quotes

“In fact writing a computer program is a pretty good way to summarize knowledge about any set of rules.”

Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable

Source: Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Chapter 2, “Silken Fetters” (p. 58)

“Should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?”

Seymour Papert (1928–2016) MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator

Spacewar http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html ROLLING STONE · 7 DECEMBER 1972

“Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”

John Backus (1924–2007) American computer scientist

Quoted in the IBM employee magazine Think in 1979. Cited by his Associated Press obituary http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17704662/

“It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”

Bill Gates book The Road Ahead

Source: The Road Ahead

“The wonderful thing about dynamic typing is it lets you express anything that is computable. And type systems don’t — type systems are typically decidable, and they restrict you to a subset. People who favor static type systems say “it’s fine, it’s good enough; all the interesting programs you want to write will work as types”. But that’s ridiculous — once you have a type system, you don’t even know what interesting programs are there.”

Gilad Bracha American software engineer

Software Engineering Radio Episode 140: Newspeak and Pluggable Types with Gilad Bracha http://www.se-radio.net/2009/07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-types-with-gilad-bracha/