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

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

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

#261

Post by avar »

lmpdev wrote: post #248
mgkimsal wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish modern OS could keep up with my typing and window switching and app launching and ... I'm constantly perturbed and interrupted when some app window just 'hangs' for a few seconds (some garbage collection going on, probably?). I can't pinpoint any one thing, just... everything seems relatively slow in 2022 compared to, even 10 years ago, and certainly 20. Applications weren't always phoning home to check things…

This makes me wonder if real time operating systems might one day become popular as interfaces for powerusers

Because power users tired of slow userspace will want their kernel to be slow too?

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

#262

Post by oconnor663 »

svat wrote: post #223
xwolfi wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 cho…

> So teacher, that is how we spent the summer of 1960.

ENIAC was finished in 1945. I cannot imagine how small the programming world must've felt back then.

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

#264

Post by dachryn »

mgkimsal wrote: post #244
vario wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wish modern OS could keep up with my typing and window switching and app launching and ... I'm constantly perturbed and interrupted when some app window just 'hangs' for a few seconds (some garbage collection going on, probably?). I can't pinpoint any one thing, just... everything seems relatively slow in 2022 compared to, even 10 years ago, and certainly 20. Applications weren't always phoning home to check things…

there is a reason linux systems with i3 window managers are getting super popular these days. It's all about the instant response

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

#265

Post by vario »

svat wrote: post #255
vario wrote: post #227

A math noobie here: I want to learn the TAOCP but the pre-req is Concrete Mathematics which I also find hard--it seems almost cryptic. Any ideas for a book before Concrete Mathematics? Thanks in advance.

Concrete Mathematics is not a prerequisite, but an expanded version of the "Mathematical Preliminaries" section of TAOCP. (More precisely, Knuth and later Graham used to teach a course at Stanford based on that section of TAOCP; the book Concrete Mathematics is based on the lecture notes of that course.) That apart, I (and Knuth) recommend just skipping the math parts when they get hard. You can always come back to t…

Wow, thank you for this great answer!

It makes me wonder though why previous published mathematics about computer programming has been allegedly faulty. Since I don't know enough math to objectively see whether Knuth has succeeded in his task or not...

TAOCP could have benefited a lot if someone had written a simpler on-ramping version, with examples in a powerful but newbie-friendly industrial-grade language, such as C#.

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

#266

Post by laichzeit0 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #245
cromwellian wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won! Emacs vs VI war over. It's finally over thanks to Knuth! VI users will be forced to pay reparations, and agree to cede territory back to the Emacs military alliance. :)

apparently only uses one screen too. can we (re)start some religious wars over that now? :)

I’d bet it’s also a very vanilla Emacs with little to no plug-ins bar a few custom functions and key mappings that he wrote like 30 years ago.

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

#269

Post by psychoslave »

kragen wrote: post #134
openfuture wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world changes through the collective effort of the people who inhabit it. Not because some demigod wrote a script.

Mostly the world changes due to unpredictable emergent phenomena, but occasionally you do get intentional changes as well. But intention is individual, not collective; there's no such thing as collective intention. At best you have many people's intentions in agreement. Rarely does that arise in a workplace.

What do you mean with "collective intention"? A person intention is the result of collective effort of its neurons. Things like collective representations and collective unconscious are well established concepts.

Whether these things positively exists outside of one mental experiment is an other matter, but so is the notion of individual and self.

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

#270

Post by kragen »

leereeves wrote: post #126
radicalbyte wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the only one. If we're honest most of us buy the series as a mark of status / pride, not out of any plan to actually read it. I mean yeah I do plan to. Probably once I've retired. But that's a long way away :-)

I use it more like a dictionary. I don't read it from start to finish, but if I need an algorithm for something, I look it up in Knuth.

Consider also CLRS.
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