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For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

quantamagazine.org

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Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#131

Post by strbean »

snazz wrote: post #82
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a professional musician, you have to make sure your 70%-version is good enough that people gladly pay for seeing it. Or you just do electronic music, so that's not an issue!

A lot of live electronic music performances involve some pretty serious showmanship.

One of my favorite "laptop DJ" moments -

I saw Brock Hampton at a festival in 2018. Hadn't heard of them before, and they were described to me as a boy band so I had low expectations. Their performance was bizarrely wonderful - they were all painted blue and wearing orange jumpsuits. Anyways, they have a DJ with a Macbook and a bunch of rappers. At one point mid-song they have a bar of silence, and I swear I saw the DJ lean forward and hit spacebar to pause the track and then resume it after.

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#133

Post by amelius »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #54
markarranz wrote: post #12

> I write an average of five new programs every week. Poets have to write poems. I have to write computer programs. It seems more obvious now that I read it. A lot of programmers out there, including myself, are looking for ways to improve their skills and I never thought to myself to write more programs. And not just programs for the sake of programs, but programs that force you to explain to the computer that you u…

>The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A"…

If I were graded solely on quantity, I would produce stuff that only just barely passes the bar of being a pot. (If you take a clump of clay and stick your finger in it, you basically have a pot.) Therefore, I think the story is false.

Nice story though.

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#134

Post by svat »

pmiller2 wrote: post #23
bitwize wrote: post #3

People often say "TAOCP is a dense, technical book, you don't just sit down and read it cover to cover." It is dense and it is technical, but it's also a joy to sit down and read and this is why. Knuth doesn't present an algorithm and annotate it with (Foobar 1968) and that's that. He says "Bazquux came up with an early version of this algorithm in 1962 while working on missile trajectories for the Department of Defe…

I agree that Knuth's exposition is a joy to read, and there are a lot of significant mathematical insights to be had within those volumes. I just wish he could get away from MIX/MMIX. I don't find it very useful or interesting as a pseudocode, and I think it gets in the way of understanding.

Only a very tiny part of the books is in MIX/MMIX (by my count from 3 years ago; details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14520230) — if you don't care about it just ignore those programs/sections; it doesn't get in the way of anything. (Similarly you can ignore the mathematics if that's not what you want. You'd be skipping past a big chunk of the book in that case, though.)

On the other hand, MMIX is actually a very nice architecture for a programmer to write assembly/machine code for — it has lots of registers, etc. It's more pleasant to write in MMIXAL than x86 Assembly or (I imagine) ARM or even RISC-V. So if you just want that part of the programmer experience, it's a great way to have some understanding at all levels.

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#135

Post by rapind »

amelius wrote: post #133
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A"…

If I were graded solely on quantity, I would produce stuff that only just barely passes the bar of being a pot. (If you take a clump of clay and stick your finger in it, you basically have a pot.) Therefore, I think the story is false. Nice story though.

True if all you care about are grades (which are what? A badge?). I'd probably knock out what I needed to pass (make it through the gate) and then focus on improving.

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#136

Post by fooker »

paganel wrote: post #101
nickdrozd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what he has in mind are small programs that do some kind of nontrivial computation without much in the way of IO or UI. For example, [1] is a program from December 2019 that "finds n-bit binary squares that are palindromic". A great way to get into this kind of thing if you're stuck for ideas is to go through the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences [2] and just write little programs to print out the firs…

> is a program from December 2019 that "finds n-bit binary squares that are palindromic". No dis-respect for Donald Knuth (who of course I found orders and orders of magnitude above programmers such as myself) and no dis-respect to people that found those types of programs interesting, but there are also programmers (like me) for whom those programs are just simple riddles, with almost no interest whatsoever. They're…

Well you can write an interpreter or a compiler for a simple language you design.

You can try to make text-based games.

You can make a bare-bones browser.

You can write a simulator for ..say.. classical mechanics.

Are none of these interesting for you?

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#137

Post by spats1990 »

amelius wrote: post #133
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A"…

If I were graded solely on quantity, I would produce stuff that only just barely passes the bar of being a pot. (If you take a clump of clay and stick your finger in it, you basically have a pot.) Therefore, I think the story is false. Nice story though.

But then you'd get sick of making such shitty pots, if you liked pottery as an art form enough to want to learn it, and you'd start trying to make better ones because just passing the bar probably wouldn't be enough for your sense of aesthetics/craftsmanship (or maybe it would, and then you would have learned something as well)

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#138

Post by meestaahjoshee »

snazz wrote: post #82
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a professional musician, you have to make sure your 70%-version is good enough that people gladly pay for seeing it. Or you just do electronic music, so that's not an issue!

A lot of live electronic music performances involve some pretty serious showmanship.

to be fair, a lot of them are just pushing a play button as well

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#139

Post by traderjane »

circlefavshape wrote: post #16
plg wrote: post #4

I like this: "A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life."

I've heard it said (maybe by Frank Zappa? can't remember for sure) that the difference between a professional musician and an amateur is not how well they play at their best, but how well they play at their worst.

That’s still saying talent is awesome. A metaphorical chess player who can beat you half asleep probably has both a high minimum and maximum.

Re: For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

#140

Post by pbourke »

kragen wrote: post #48
pbourke wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like an interesting way to get into programming. This would be an iconoclastic route into programming, to say the least. If you are looking for a more approachable or practical book that gets you programming and introduces some theory I recommend “Classic Computer Science Problems in Python” by David Kopec. Reading TAOCP to get into programming is sort of like reading a physics textbook in order to build a do…

Iconoclastic? What idols are being smashed by our hypothetical TAOCP-reading novice?

Not the best word choice. s/iconoclastic/singular/
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