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Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

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Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#221

Post by cromwellian »

jordigh wrote: post #206
User23 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moving between EMacs panes Well, the editor wars are over folks. More seriously, Don Knuth is a treasure. One of the coolest things about computing science is how all the greats in the field are either alive, or within the living memory of people who are.

Emacs windows. There are no panes in Emacs. The Emacs window is held in a frame. The operating system calls that frame a window, but that's not what Emacs calls it. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WindowsAndFrames As to why Emacs calls everything something else, well, Emacs was first. As to why Emacs doesn't change its names, well, have you ever tried to change Stallman's mind?

I know. I’ve been an emacs user for 30 years, but I tend to just call them buffers. In the old days when I would be using a PPP or SLIP connection into a dialup Unix, my whole screen would be Emacs in VT100 mode so it made a lot more sense to thing of them as windows back then.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#222

Post by eichin »

hintymad wrote: post #210
cromwellian wrote: post #182

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Knuth in his home, my wife was doing some photography for him. He took me to his room and showed me his setup, he was researching Soduku algorithms at the time. His hands were blisteringly quick, moving between EMacs panes, triggering evaluations and printing of results, as fast as any 20 year old. In his 80s , he hasn’t seemed to suffer any mental decline. I started talk…

I also noticed smart people type really fast (if they can touch type) and can switch between multiple windows/tabs fast too. It's not because their fingers move faster than normal people, but because their mind moves smoothly so they can produce a long string of command with stopping to think. > as fast as any 20 year old. I I certainly hope so. Though I think it's more likely that Knuth can be as fast as other 20-ye…

As someone whose computing career was improved by learning to touch-type in grade school (Mom had been a secretary, saw that these "personal" computers had keyboards, and bludgeoned the high school to let me in to the summer-school typing class) it's not actually the speed that matters - though that does certainly impress people - it's that it's "automatic". If you're not thinking about letters and where they are, you aren't distracted from the entire sentence (or function) you're holding in your head - it just pours out through your hands into the machine.

(Sometimes I joke about how my hands know emacs, not my brain - but if someone asks me what keys I hit for something, my fingers move and then I work backwards from that.)

(And if you're collecting correlations - I have no musical performance talent at all and have spent maybe 10 hours total poking at musical keyboards - for me, typing is all typing, I expect musical keyboarding is a related but parallel thing, not the same thing.)

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#223

Post by svat »

xwolfi wrote: post #177
svat wrote: post #131

Note that, to get an idea of the contents, you can see the previously published fascicles, and earlier drafts online (pre-fascicles): • Mathematical Preliminaries Redux: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc5a.ps.gz • 7.2.2 Introduction to Backtracking: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc5b.ps.gz • 7.2.2.1 Dancing Links: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc5c.ps.gz • 7.2.2.2 Satisfiability: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knut…

[flagged]

Re "being paid", consider that he took early retirement in 1992 to work on this book that he sees as his life's work (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html) (and until then was doing in his "side" time, separate from his job of teaching and research), giving up whatever salary a tenured Stanford CS professor's would be, and has been living off savings and royalties since then: he only gets "paid" when people choose to buy the results. (And if he were to focus on money he'd probably put out more newer volumes than 2 in 30 years, rather than keep making newer editions / fixes to earlier volumes…)

But you're right that Knuth has a dream "job" that the rest of us, at least those with the slightest "scholarly" inclinations, can only envy him for: he reads, explores, digests, and explains, the topics he likes and in the way he likes, and the results are great. But when you're already a legendary programmer in college (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7), and have won a Turing Award at 36 (http://hagiograffiti.blogspot.com/2009/01/when-will-singular...) for a book you've been writing in your free time, one can say you're entitled to the life.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#224

Post by Koshkin »

User23 wrote: post #204
smitty1e wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the Christian, reading the Bible is internally transformative.

For example: https://www.amazon.com/3-16-Bible-Texts-Illuminated/dp/08957...

I was expecting to see 3:14 on the cover!

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#225

Post by girvo »

_8j50 wrote: post #200
xupybd wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have heard of the term "Kata" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata It's used by many to perfect their craft.

Pumsae for the tae-kwon-do folks. It is awesome.

You just gave me flashbacks to doing all eight taegeuk pumsae for my black belt grading

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#226

Post by vario »

hintymad wrote: post #210
cromwellian wrote: post #182

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Knuth in his home, my wife was doing some photography for him. He took me to his room and showed me his setup, he was researching Soduku algorithms at the time. His hands were blisteringly quick, moving between EMacs panes, triggering evaluations and printing of results, as fast as any 20 year old. In his 80s , he hasn’t seemed to suffer any mental decline. I started talk…

I also noticed smart people type really fast (if they can touch type) and can switch between multiple windows/tabs fast too. It's not because their fingers move faster than normal people, but because their mind moves smoothly so they can produce a long string of command with stopping to think. > as fast as any 20 year old. I I certainly hope so. Though I think it's more likely that Knuth can be as fast as other 20-ye…

Google and Youtube often think I am a robot because of how fast I operate on their sites: typing, clicking, switching tabs etc..

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#228

Post by Zababa »

cromwellian wrote: post #201
User23 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moving between EMacs panes Well, the editor wars are over folks. More seriously, Don Knuth is a treasure. One of the coolest things about computing science is how all the greats in the field are either alive, or within the living memory of people who are.

These are the photos my wife took at his home. https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knu... Like the 5th picture down you can see him standing (he uses a standing desk!) and if you blow up the screen, you can see part of an emacs window on the left hand side. I believe he also was using emacs shell windows as well, but not 100% sure. Direct Link: https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2020/0…

The pictures are beautiful, thank you for sharing that.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#229

Post by Koshkin »

krylon wrote: post #109
rietta wrote: post #69

Very cool. I own the originals and the 4th but sadly I have to admit that even though I am a reasonably accomplished developer with a couple of CS degrees I have a hard time understanding this work and have not yet really read it. I feel like I am publicly admitting failure just posting this. I still have time to make sure these are not just bookshelf decorations though.

I vaguely recall an anecdote being told here on HN where Donald Knuth met Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said something along the lines of "I admire you very much, I have read all of your books!", to which Donald Knuth replied something to the effect of "I don't think so." (more politely, though, I presume). Which is to say I don't think many people have actually worked their way all through them. Neither have I, there's no…

Anecdotally, Bill Gates once said that anyone who have read all of TAOCP could be hired by Microsoft on the spot.

Re: Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print

#230

Post by girvo »

andrepd wrote: post #158
moron4hire wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except everyone who talks about how to read the books successfully--including the books themselves--talk about jumping around in them in a way that requires a lot of skimming . I don't find the text in any other book I own to be insufficient, or even noticeably that different from Knuth's books (with the obvious exception of some fly-by-night print-on-demand stuff purchased off Amazon in recent years). It's an assert…

Subjectively, I like TAoCP's typography much better. But hey, that's just me.

I like TAoCP's typography better in a subjective aesthetic sense. But when I'm actually trying to read, understand, and work-from workbooks/exercises, I find the Linear Algebra example a lot better.
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