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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

#61

Post by jfk13 »

loquor wrote: post #57
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

As Tevye might say, You're right!

> it's better to leave weaknesses be and instead utilize your strengths

You're right!

> They can't both be right.

You know, you are also right.

- - -

Or maybe this illustrates that overly simplistic "solutions" to the complexities of life are just that... overly simplistic, that is, not solutions.

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

#62

Post by coldtea »

heinrichhartman wrote: post #31
circlefavshape wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The hardest part about professional music, is that you have to perform at a schedule. It takes a lot of effort to perpare your body physically and mentally for peak performance ... and often-times you just fail. Have a bad day. That happens. There will be many concerts, where you are just at 70% of your peak ability. As a professional musician, you have to make sure your 70%-version is good enough that people gladly…

>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!

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

#63

Post by 7thaccount »

kragen wrote: post #46
7thaccount wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who else would clean his toilets? Is he wealthy? I assumed no.

Yes, that's how he was able to build his house around a custom-built pipe organ. Also, though, many men of his generation leave the toilet-cleaning up to their wives. But he says he and Jill each have uniforms for this purpose. (My toilet looks and smells much better now.)

Makes a bit more sense.

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

#64

Post by taeric »

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"…

What is this from. Love the general idea.

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

#65

Post by sherr »

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…

It's the same with almost every creative endeavour. Painting as well as poetry and programming. Practice makes you better, even if the result is sometimes poor in isolation.

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

#66

Post by tedkalaw »

taeric wrote: post #64
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"…

What is this from. Love the general idea.

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

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

#67

Post by niklasd »

thebean11 wrote: post #59
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.

I also heard that McKinsey adheres to that strategy when investing in training for their employees. Though that is only hearsay and it doesn't mean anything, they could also be wrong. But I think you are right when saying that the opposite approach also has a lot of followers right now.

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

#68

Post by ISL »

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 .

That's the most-pleasant .rc file I've ever read.

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

#69

Post by nickcw »

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"…

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.

Sometimes I get the same feeling when coding, when really in the zone with the magical feeling of flow.

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

#70

Post by third_I »

As Paul Dirac so eloquently put,

> “I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit experiment. If Schrödinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further development of the theory.”

> Scientific American, May 1963.

By that token, coding should be beautiful first, in elegance of structure and forms. And then we can iron out the bugs.

I tend to agree.

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