Donald Knuth Quotes

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

Extreme programming is an emotional experience.

If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn't that interesting.

'PhotoCard' has 20 times as much code as the sum of 'QuickDraw,' 'MacPaint,' and 'HyperCard.' It is more elaborate and complicated, with all the client and server stuff. It took a lot more of me to do this than other projects, requiring an almost Mother Teresa dedication to do it.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

I have a very, very difficult job.

When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

Trying to apply formal methods to all software projects is just as bad as trying to apply code-and-fix development to all projects.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to tail an eighty year-old woman Its hard. Really hard. Really...slow. -Grabrielle

Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.

Making a movie: It's so hard. It's the hardest of all the things I do.

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won't get much smarter.

Sam [Mendes] said he took advantage of the fact that Kate and I were so close for many years. He knew it was something he could harness in our performances, and we knew that too.

If there is a bug in your code than you have to drop everything you're doing and go fix it.

It is a fact that you project what you are.

It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place.

Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist's plate than on the physicist's: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!

Java is C++ without the guns, clubs and knives.