Donald Knuth (Born 1938 )
Computer Scientist
Verified
- "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." -- on the biggest challenge facing programmers today
- "... the psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large."
- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it" (1977 )
- Source: Donald Knuth's webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion.
- "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." (1996 )
- Source: Foreword to the book A=B
- "Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer."
- Source: "Sorting and Searching"
- "Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
- Source: "Computer Programming as an Art" 1974 Turing Award lecture
- Counter Claim: Edsger Dijkstra (Tony Hoare) [1]
Attributed
- "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."
- "... 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."
- "A list is only as strong as its weakest link."
- "An algorithm must be seen to be believed."
