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For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression

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

#181

Post by coribuci »

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"…

This does not work for SW. No matter how long they tried quality programs are very very rare.

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

#182

Post by saagarjha »

samatman wrote: post #107
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, yes, of course. The question was about the sort of little programs someone could write daily, and the answer resembles crosswords or sudoku, which many people are in the habit of completing once a day. Would completing one integer sequence algorithm (brilliant suggestion btw!) change the world around you? No, of course not. Would it make you a better programmer , though? Certainly it would. Which would mean, wh…

> Would completing one integer sequence algorithm (brilliant suggestion btw!) change the world around you? No, of course not.

Depends on the sequence, of course. I hear a lot of people would be interested in a fast algorithm for computing membership in OEIS A000040.

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

#183

Post by RMPR »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #168
fooker wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

500 lines or less, hold my beer.

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

#184

Post by RMPR »

thewebcount wrote: post #177
tcgv wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a frequent user of SO, but I find leetcode [1] much better when I just want to practice coding / problem solving. Their free account is more than enough to have some fun ;) [1] https://leetcode.com/

I disagree. Leetcode and related sites have problem descriptions that are often vague or nonsensical. Just figuring out what the author is trying to say is more of a challenge than the actual program sometimes.

I feel exactly the same, I thought that it's because I'm not a native speaker, at least now I know that I'm not alone.

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

#185

Post by coldtea »

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.

Showmanship, yes, which is different that musicianship and needing your "70%-version" of the musical performance to be "good enough".

Also, a lot of other live electronic music performances have almost zero showmanship, so there's that too.

(Speaking as an electronic musician)

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

#186

Post by smabie »

alxlaz wrote: post #15
sasaf5 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. The editor on the left side does look like emacs.

That's the FVWM window manager. His FVWM config (or at least some version of it) is available if you're curious: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/.fvwm2rc .

Man, he's really bought in to that whole literate programming thing..

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

#187

Post by RMPR »

7thaccount wrote: post #80
mhh__ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think MATLAB is a little bit of a problem. Or at least, I want to kill myself whenever I have to use it. Python too although in more subtle ways (I like to abuse the type system, Python is just a hacked together pile of shit with tolerable syntax) Physics textbooks tend to get "unique" when you get to topics like Quantum Field Theory. Basic Textbooks are usually fairly to the point. "Advanced Engineering Mathematic…

With Matlab, you can immediately create a Matrix and transpose it, find the inverse...etc. I think it is optimized really well for undergraduate excercises that are really simple (I have two numerical methods textbooks which use Matlab fine). I agree that anything more complex than a couple of functions and a loop is probably better off somewhere else in a lot of cases. With that being said, it has built-in support f…

You seem to not consider a major player in the field: Python. There's probably a reason Andrew Ng switched from Matlab to Python for teaching.

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

#188

Post by goatlover »

yesenadam wrote: post #33
barrkel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about defining your own idea of success in life? Taking your utility function, your definition of success, from someone else, is only one step removed from being jealous of someone on Instagram. Think, and judge, for yourself.

Oddly, this comment seems mainly to put down the GP precisely for thinking and judging for themselves. Please allow people to like and utilize the good ideas of others. Thankfully, we don't have to invent every wheel we use.

If you meet the Buddha on the road ...

It's true we don't have to invent every wheel. But it's also true that we don't have to treat invented wheels as gospel. There's more than one standard for living a good life, which depends on the person.

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

#189

Post by RMPR »

pkhamre wrote: post #141

I tend to be a good writer and able to express specific feelings easily. Should I learn to code?

Coding is a valuable skill for everyone, not only computer scientist, a popular recommendation of mine for those who want to learn what it looks like while having a decent introduction is: Automate The Boring Stuff With Python https://nostarch.com/automatestuff2

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

#190

Post by danielscrubs »

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…

Is this your way of saying you're a programmer not a computer scientist? Because his job is as a scientist.

Calling his exercises simple riddles is disrespectful. It's like calling doing a 5km run every morning, simple walking. The proof is in the pudding, he has impacted the world in a profound way.

But on a more positive note. Which non-cs programmer heroes exists today? I'm thinking John Carmack.

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