Donald Knuth Quotes

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

Until computers and robots make quantum advances, they basically remain adding machines: capable only of doing things in which all the variables are controlled and predictable.

A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines; I never learned to type very well.

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.

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.

Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.

The way to get killed around machinery was to take things for granted.

In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.

What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like the shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be constantly changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History, as we know it, would be impossible. It would cease to exist.

We're a machine and we have to be worked in the same way we have to be fed.

I did once leave one of [my kid] watching something on YouTube, something completely innocuous, and I went out of the room and the algorithm kept playing the next thing and the next thing and somehow worked its way around to showing him the trailer for John Carpenter's The Thing - at which point I walked back in. He wasn't happy.

No one knows what the right algorithm is, but it gives us hope that if we can discover some crude approximation of whatever this algorithm is and implement it on a computer, that can help us make a lot of progress.

O truth divine! enlightened by thy ray, I grope and guess no more, but see my way.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise — by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?

Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lived. Bugs must be debugged. Changing requirements and the need for increased functionality mean the program itself may be modified on an ongoing basis. During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code. It is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer.

One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction.

The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.

We are to extend forgiveness to others in the same way that God did to us: Unconditionally.

I've always wanted to work with Cameron Crowe. I've auditioned for him several times for various projects over the last ten years, and I've always admired the way he worked with me.

Force is followed by loss of strength. This is not the way of the Tao. That which goes against the Tao comes to an early end.