Thursday, 14 February 2008

happy birthday mr knuth



Happy Birthday Mr. Knuth

I was going to write something longer yesterday on Donald Knuth's 70th

birthday, but Jeff at Coding Horror did a great job already. That's my

bonus for being too busy to blog on the actual birthday.

Knuth's Art of Computer Programming has probably been the most

influential programming book for me, and its advice is extremely

useful to this day. If you program computers even a little bit, you

should read these books. They are far more valuable than

language-specific manuals.

Knuth is firmly on the side of programming as art, which I fully

share. Any time someone tries to reduce programming into a factory or

drone sort of model, where if you "fully spec it out" the

implementation is "trivial," a little bird dies somewhere and I get


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