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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.

-Donald Knuth

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My General Working Style

Donald Knuth

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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.

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The Whole Thing That Makes A Mathematician’s Life Worthwhile Is That He Gets The Grudging Admiration Of Three Or Four Colleagues.

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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.

We Should Forget About Small Efficiencies, Say About 97% Of The Time: Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil. Yet We Should Not Pass Up Our Opportunities In That Critical 3%

We Should Forget About Small Efficiencies, Say About 97% Of The Time: Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil.

The Best Programs Are Written So That Computing Machines Can Perform Them Quickly And So That Human Beings Can Understand Them Clearly. A Programmer Is Ideally An Essayist Who Works With Traditional Aesthetic And Literary Forms As Well As Mathematical Concepts, To Communicate The Way That An Algorithm Works And To Convince A Reader That The Results Will Be Correct.

When You Write A Program, Think Of It Primarily As A Work Of Literature. You're Trying To Write Something That Human Beings Are Going To Read. Don't Think Of It Primarily As Something A Computer Is Going To Follow. The More Effective You Are At Making Your Program Readable, The More Effective It's Going To Be: You'll Understand It Today, You'll Understand It Next Week, And Your Successors Who Are Going To Maintain And Modify It Will Understand It.

Whenever The C++ Language Designers Had Two Competing Ideas As To How They Should Solve Some Problem, They Said, "ok, We'll Do Them Both". So The Language Is Too Baroque For My Taste.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

The Best Theory Is Inspired By Practice.

Everyday Life Is Like Programming, I Guess. If You Love Something You Can Put Beauty Into It.

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.

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