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17 Donald Knuth Quotes

Donald Knuth offers witty, thoughtful takes on design, programming, and science.

Donald Knuth quotes

  1. Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

    #1

  2. Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

    #2

  3. 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.

    #3

  4. 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.

    #4

  5. 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.

    #5

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

    #6

  7. A mathematical formula should never be 'owned' by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.

    #7

  8. I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

    #8

  9. I can't go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.

    #9

  10. 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.

    #10

  11. An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

    #11

  12. The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

    #12

  13. Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

    #13

  14. A list is only as strong as its weakest link.

    #14

  15. 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.

    #15

  16. 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.

    #16

  17. 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.

    #17