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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

#161

Post by sedatk »

asiachick wrote: post #157
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."

That's about the most depressing thing I've ever heard. So basically if I'm not great at everything I suck. I guess Knuth must be amazing in bed, can play every instrument known, solve top problems in quantum mechanics, compete in all olympic events, etc or he's not having a good life.

He probably meant an attitude towards life; giving your best effort to even the most mundane task to get the best out of it. That would also elevate your success in what you do best, and your satisfaction in life in general.

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

#162

Post by Forge36 »

jacobolus wrote: post #144
nickcw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I had the same experience in my art evening classes. One evening our teacher told us that we had to produce three paintings in the 2.5 hour lesson. It is challenging enough producing one in that time period. It was a fantastic learning experience in letting go. The first picture I did was OK, the second was better and the third was great - all because I'd given up thinking at that point and was just doing. Someti…

On the other hand, I took a few semesters of elective photography courses in high school, and there’s a certain essential amount of time it takes to make a good photo print and run it through all the chemicals. It can’t really be compressed down shorter than about 35–40 minutes for the whole process with only limited ability to parallelize the work while maintaining quality, which makes it tough to make more than 1 o…

The art of a good film photograph isn't printing lots of pieces it's taking 10 shots, and choosing to print two of them. There are parts you can't rush, there are clear steps to taking clear photos, well exposed photos. Being able to look at the negative, and know if it turned out well is the shill you learn.

The students who focused on one good print had a lot of prep work. Getting the final step right (for software, shipping and deploying to production) isn't something we should rush. Learning all the steps which lead up to that final one well makes a tremendous difference

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

#164

Post by blondin »

asiachick wrote: post #157
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."

That's about the most depressing thing I've ever heard. So basically if I'm not great at everything I suck. I guess Knuth must be amazing in bed, can play every instrument known, solve top problems in quantum mechanics, compete in all olympic events, etc or he's not having a good life.

the original quote lost its full context and is giving the wrong meaning. knuth is trying to tell us to find joy in the most mundane things we do. he gave the example of cleaning the toilet, which his family does wearing suits.

solving top problems in quantum mechanics is, by any means, no mundane task.

but i have heard similar quotes before. about the joy of doing something being more important than the result. i think it's because joy is so contagious. shared joy makes you even happier, imo.

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

#165

Post by philiplu »

I learned programming from TAOCP, but that was in the mid-70s, when good expository texts were rarer. I mostly skipped over the math then, and tried to figure out the algorithms. Actually wrote a MIX assembler/simulator, which taught me a ton of low-level programming.

If you're into the math side of this, I'd highly recommend the book "Concrete Mathematics", which Knuth wrote with Graham and Patashnik. I got it to get better at solving problems over at Project Euler, but it's a fun read, like TAOCP. As deep as it is, it's amazingly light-hearted, down to the graffiti in the margins from the students who proof-tested the material in a Stanford course.

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

#166

Post by taeric »

411111111111111 wrote: post #84
snazz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art & Fear? It's also the third-highest-score comment on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

yes, its from Art & Fear. The Art of War is unrelated but also form an insightful fella. more focused on adversarial confrontations than Art & Fear though

So, I have now put /War of Art/ and /Art and Fear/ in my queue. I also have a physical of /Art of War/ somewhere. I'm assuming that is a different thing, though.

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

#167

Post by dhosek »

kragen wrote: post #112
dhosek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were two graphic output options in the previewer. There were specialized graphic terminals using the GDDM protocol (this code was actually written by someone in Germany who sent me their changes). The original code that I wrote used Tektronics graphics protocols available in the terminal driver that connected to the mainframe via a protocol converter that enabled the use of cheap ASCII terminals instead of the…

Oh man, you were drawing pixel fonts on a 4014 storage tube? That must have taken forever .

It was an emulation of it on a PC. VT100+Tektronix was a common graphics option on terminals of the era and the PC terminal software provided that as its graphics choice. I had some optimizations like replacing any characters below a certain threshold size with a solid box based on the bitmap's bounding box. It was reasonably fast given the speed of the connection.

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

#168

Post by freddie_mercury »

fooker wrote: post #136
paganel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You can't really write five of those in a week.

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

#169

Post by agumonkey »

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"…

Resonates with the rise of USA. A few books about electricity mentionned that Europe was caught in a neverending debate about ideal theories while US was applying simple tricks and improving understanding on the way.

I'm also wildly guilty of the analysis paralysis... I did try to set up schedules and goals to iterate but it always die before I did any real progress.

Oh and btw, some dude said Wright bros. won the race to flight because they approached it with low cost engineering/lab mindset, rapid prototyping fashion. Other companies with more resources tried the moonshot approach, did 1 so-called plane in 2 years, failed to fly, ran out of resources and died.

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

#170

Post by tartoran »

lordleft wrote: post #36

Donald Knuth manages to be brilliant, well-read and also just a nice person. Sort of refreshing given our field's tendency to let mean-spirited people off the hook if they happen to be good at what they do.

Even here on HN I've seen quite a bit of criticism of Donald Knuth alluding that somehow he's become irrelevant. Personally I appreciate Donald Knuth the scientist as well as Donald Knuth the person. Mean spirited people will get better at what they do but will probably miss the mark on becoming a great and humble person such as Donald Knuth. I'm really grateful that he's still among us and still working on his his books and that he shares his wisdom with us.
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