Donald Knuth Quotes

57 quotes in 887 categories

• Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
• If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
• People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on…
• Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
• By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.
• Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.
• Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects…
• Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is…
• The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in…
• The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to…
• The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.
• I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
• I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
• Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is…
• How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world.
• People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs…
• Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random
• The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
• We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
• We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass…

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