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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

#201

Post by vbezhenar »

danielscrubs wrote: post #192
vbezhenar wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people praise Fabrice Bellard. Not sure if he's counted as a non-scientist, but his achievements are astounding. Although I think that many heroes are hidden behind corporations. Those people who contributed most to Google Search or architectured Chrome. Those people who built systems everyone relies on. For example almost every Java project uses Spring Framework, but I'm sure that it was founded by one or few v…

Fabrice Bellard seems like an awesome guy! Do you guys think programmers don't recognise each others work as much as in other fields?

I don't really know much about other fields. Do architects recognize those who architected outstanding projects, like huge bridges and tallest skyscrapers?

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

#202

Post by Kaiyou »

coribuci wrote: post #181
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"…

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

And when they happen, developers decide they need to "further improve" it, destroying everything that was valuable about it in the first place.

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

#204

Post by gowld »

MR4D wrote: post #119
gowld wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A source that disproves a made up unsourced story is fake?

And here's audio of the authors saying that it's a true story: http://www.innonavi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/David-Bay...

That's a repetition of the same claim, not a source. He doesn't mention simple information like who or where the class was, which there is no reason to be secret about.

Also, it doesn't pass the obvious sniff test, that a teacher would spend a whole semester giving half of his class a terrible experience that uttery failed to teach them anything, leaving them with "a pile of dead clay" as the author claims.

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

#205

Post by gowld »

sincerely wrote: post #125
detaro wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prove what? That someone printed the anecdote in a book?

What would suffice, video recordings of every class?

Naming the teacher, the school, the year, the city, something that would give a hint for someone to follow up for verification.

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

#206

Post by 0x445442 »

gen220 wrote: post #122
bbbobbb wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean though? What programs? I can't write new programs at work where I maintain existing applications for the most part. What kind of programs, not for the sake of programs, can you actually write almost daily?

You can write "meta" programs that help you maintain existing applications. Whenever I start at a new company, before I get thrown into the heart of things and become "too busy" to write these kinds of programs, I like to write things that automate the boring stuff. Some recent examples: - a cli for inspecting, adding comments to, and updating the status of JIRA tickets. because our hosted JIRA instance was god-awful…

> There are some companies full of engineers whose actual job is to write tools like this; I'm not sure what they would do for fun :P

I think there are a lot of organizations that would be better served devoting more resources to the meta work given the labor and infrastructure costs. I would go out on a limb and say the capital expended on the majority of projects I've worked on in my career had a smaller ROI (because it was negative in most cases) than would have been the case had the organization just invested in improving internal tools and processes of their existing systems.

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

#207

Post by gus_massa »

spats1990 wrote: post #137
amelius wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It depends a lot if it is a voluntary art class, or you are forced to take it. (Or it is the only job you could get, and you are not to interested in it.)

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

#208

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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"…

I thought that story had been debunked, the experiment never took place.

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

#209

Post by tonyedgecombe »

tedkalaw wrote: post #66
taeric wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this from. Love the general idea.

War of Art. Solid book; picked it up after seeing this passage on HN hehe

I really disliked that book, I found nothing actionable in it.

It is so often recommended that I read it to the end thinking there would be some jewel waiting for me. There wasn't.

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

#210

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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…

There were quite a few people on the burnout[1] thread that wanted to change the world.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876241

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