3 ms·
That's the way he likes to paint himself. From a lecture he gave at my university I remember that he said something along the lines of, that he usually came up
by weinzierl 6y ago
That's the way he likes to paint himself. From a lecture he gave at my university I remember that he said something along the lines of, that he usually came up with the idea and others wrote the code. From the experience out of the same lecture, however, I can tell you first hand that he knows his way around code and that he can code. The lecture was indeed more of a hands on workshop with Knuth spending most of the time in Emacs coding MMIXAL assembly - pretty low level stuff actually.
- lugged 6y agoJust because he can code doesn't mean he does on a daily basis for a day job, which is what this ask hn post is about no?
- pjmorris 6y agoArguably, TAoCP has been his day job since the 60's, and it's full of code.
- bingerman 6y agoKnuth still does code basically on a daily basis. At least that's what he said in some interview (writing two complete programs per week on average, small and large, and that definitely qualifies him as software engineer among other things) and I have no reason to doubt it. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html
- owenversteeg 6y agoOh I have absolutely no doubt that Knuth can code better than I (or most people in this thread) ever hope to. But being a programmer and a computer scientist -are- two very different things. Simply in his daily activities over the last sixty years, Knuth has been writing tens of thousands of pages, doing a lot of math, diving deep into computer science topics. (That is not what I do in my employment as a programmer.) This guy has been sitting behind a keyboard and writing code. (That is what I do.)