Saturday, August 4, 2018 at 12:09PM
Drew Wolfe

Donald Ervin Knuth

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Nearly every example of faulty reasoning that has been published is accompanied by the phrase "of course" or its equivalent.


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