Saturday, March 22, 2014

Geek: an interview with Donald Knuth...

Geek: an interview with Donald Knuth...  I'd not seen this interview from 2008 before.  The interviewer is Andrew Binstock, and it's full of interesting stuff.  Here's one sample:
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.
To programmers of a certain age (that would include me!), Donald Knuth has a status approaching that of a living god.  His monograph The Art of Computer Programming was recommended to me by Don Tarbell in 1976.  I bought the three volumes that were then available, and practically wore them out as I studied them from front to back.  Prior to reading these volumes, I had absolutely no idea that algorithms and data structures had been so well studied and understood; in that sense Knuth's volumes were revelatory for me, as well as providing a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding for me to build a career on...

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