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I started this 7 hour interview with Knuth, and it's really great. I love his childlike joy in the curiosities of mathematics.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Here's a transcribed interview with him from 2006: https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006
Also his dissertation (written without TeX
): https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2441/1/Knuth_de_1963.pdf
Also his dissertation (written without TeX
): https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2441/1/Knuth_de_1963.pdf
Donald Knuth describes accidentally receiving a $60,000 bill from using a time-share computer when running experiments on random graph in 1990. Fifteen years later, somebody pointed out their was a mistake in his code anyway.
Knuth explains his view that if you want to understand an algorithm, you have to first teach a computer to do it.
Knuth is skeptical of Dijkstra's attitude that algorithms written on paper are good enough.
Knuth is skeptical of Dijkstra's attitude that algorithms written on paper are good enough.
Knuth was able to "retire" from Stanford at 52 with money saved and royalties from "The Art of Computer Programming" to devote himself to furthering "The Art of Computer Programming".
He also had a custom organ built for his house on Stanford's campus. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html
I finished Edward Feigenbaum interviewing Knuth and am moving on to Knuth interviewing Feigenbaum
Knuth: "Iâm worried about the present state of programming. Programmers now are supposed to mostly just use libraries. Programmers arenât allowed to do their own thing from scratch anymore. Theyâre supposed to have reusable code that somebody else has written.
"Thereâs a bunch of things on the menu and you choose from these when you put them together. Whereâs the fun in that? Whereâs the beauty of that?
"Itâs very hard, [but] we have to figure out a way that we can make programming interesting for the next generation of programmers, that itâs not going to be just a matter of reading a manual and plugging in the parameters in the right order to get stuff."
Interview with John Backus (inventor of FORTRAN) is surprisingly uninteresting
Oral history interview with Fred Brooks. I didn't realize he was an NC native (and has a thick eastern NC accent).
"After the 360 came out, Tom Watson, Jr., called for our pay cards for Gene and Jerry and me and Bob, and he said, 'Do you mean we bet the company on people we donât pay any more than this?' We got instant $10,000 a year raises."
Brooks: "Well, my whole intellectual life has been one throwing interests overboard.
"When I was a graduate student you could know it all. There were two annual conferences and there were two quarterly journals and you can know the whole of computer science. And I can get progressively more ignorant in my own field for the last 50 years."
Brooks career advice (in '07) was "Look at the intersection between the computer field and biology."
When I was a (pre-dropout) math ph.d. student in '09, the joke was to put "mathematical biology" on grant applications for guaranteed funding.
I imagine it's "AI" today.
When I was a (pre-dropout) math ph.d. student in '09, the joke was to put "mathematical biology" on grant applications for guaranteed funding.
I imagine it's "AI" today.
Brooks: "Of all my technical accomplishments, making the 8-bit byte decision [from 6-bit, in the IBM 360] is far and away the most important.
"And the reason was it opened the lower case alphabet. I saw language processing as being another whole new market area that we werenât in and couldnât get into very well, as long we were doing 6-bit character sets."
