Top 15 Donald Knuth Quotes

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.

To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak of the state of the Art.

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...

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

The reason is not to glorify "bit chasing"; a more fundamental issue is at stake here: Numerical subroutines should deliver results that satisfy simple, useful mathematical laws whenever possible. [...] Without any underlying symmetry properties, the job of proving interesting results becomes extremely unpleasant. The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.

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

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

Most people only know pi in decimal.

Let's face it, if there were 10 people like me in the world, we wouldn't have time to read each other's books.