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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

#51

Post by collyw »

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.

Actually that makes sense with extreme sport even more so.

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

#52

Post by senthil_rajasek »

Whenever people bring up aesthetics in coding they forget to balance it. Here is the man himself on how he feels about code aesthetics, “I do think issues of style do come through and make certain programs a genuine pleasure to read. Probably not, however, to the extent that they would give me any transcendental emotions.” [1]

[1] Knuth, D. E. Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, California. 2001.

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

#53

Post by dirtydroog »

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.

Totally agree. It doesn't help at all. Pseudocode would have benn sufficient. Fake machine code? Nope.

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

#54

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

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

#55

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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."

This is why it's important to identify your weaknesses. Once identified they are no longer weaknesses but areas to work on.

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

#56

Post by eru »

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."

Well, one way to raise your minimum is by cooperating with other people so that they help out cover your minimum, you do theirs.

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

#57

Post by loquor »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #55
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."

This is why it's important to identify your weaknesses. Once identified they are no longer weaknesses but areas to work on.

I've heard that it's better to leave weaknesses be and instead utilize your strengths. The reason is because if you just work on your weakness, you end up being just mediocre.

What's your opinion on this?

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

#58

Post by kragen »

ScannerSparkly wrote: post #2

Has anyone read his books? Seems like an interesting way to get into programming. I enjoy reading, but I never thought that a book about programming would present it's ideas and technical details through stories.

I think it's potentially dangerous. When I was first learning to program, there were a lot of things I couldn't figure out how to do. Then I came across an algorithms textbook (Algorithms in C, by Knuth's student Sedgewick) and it explained how to do a lot of things I had never been able to figure out how to do before, and with beautiful code. This was a wonderful revelation! I then spent a lot of time studying algorithms.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn how to program! I thought that what I was missing was knowledge about algorithms, and that was occasionally right but mostly wrong. Worse, algorithmic textbooks bias you to look for the one weird trick that makes your apparently complex problem simple. But usually that trick doesn't exist, and when it does you usually have to solve the problem the hard way first before you understand the problem well enough to find it. The process of debugging, refactoring, optimizing, and testing that gives rise to the final polished form of a program cannot easily be inferred from what remains. Books like The Practice of Programming and Code Complete were much more helpful, but you can't learn to program by reading books, any more than you can learn to play baseball or win lawsuits by reading books.

I did eventually learn to program pretty well, though I'm not yet a master of the craft like Knuth, Jeff Dean, Rob Pike, Walter Bright, or Norvig. I did it largely by a practice described in this interview: writing new programs every day. I also learned a lot from pair-programming, which taught me both to read other people's code (we had collective code ownership) and to write code others could understand. My main obstacle was not ignorance but perfectionism and lack of practice.

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

#59

Post by thebean11 »

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."

Interestingly a lot of the self-helpy books coming out recently say the opposite: that investing effort into improving strengths has a higher return than improving weaknesses.

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

#60

Post by kick »

dirtydroog wrote: post #53
pmiller2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally agree. It doesn't help at all. Pseudocode would have benn sufficient. Fake machine code? Nope.

MMIX programs can actually be run, and MMIX has multiple simulators. Actual MMIX chips can be made. MMIX also allows students to reason about the properties of modern chips without experiencing quite the complexity they'd have to deal with normally. This is valuable for many reasons.
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