Donald Knuth Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.”

“The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.”

“The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.”

“God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.”

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

“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.”

“There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.”

“I'm obsessively detail-oriented.”

“I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.”

“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.”