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One of the highlights of reading The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) is the small historical lessons sprinkled in the text. Truth be told they're usually th

One of the highlights of reading The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) is the small historical lessons sprinkled in the text. Truth be told they're usually the main thing I understand. Sometimes I wish Knuth would just write a history book on computing. He has such a unique perspective as both a leader of the field and a great historian of it. Of course at this point he probably shouldn't have any distractions from TAOCP.

svat 6y ago
This reminded me of something Knuth says about this paper (starting around 8:17) in the talk I mentioned in another comment, showing that his historical knowledge, at least on this particular topic, wasn't always so deep: > The other background to this work… In 1962 I was asked to give a talk at the ACM National Conference which was held in Syracuse, and this [slide] was the review that occurred in Datamation. And basically he pans the thing [the conference]. He says “Fortunately a large number of the society's members were unable to attend.” And he goes on and says “Well, the hotel was pretty good and there was good breakfast…” But he says here “Another paper which was titled A History of Writing Compilers”—which was mine—“was actually the history of one individual's rather limited experience with *a* compiler”. > Well, that wasn't exactly true, but it was true enough: in other words, in 1962 I didn't know about almost anything of what I'm going to tell you tonight. So I took it as “maybe, you know, if I'm going to talk about the history of something, maybe I ought to actually research it, look into it.” And so over the next few years I started learning more about this and the more I learned the more fascinating it got… More broadly though, I echo your comment about Knuth's passion for history, which goes surprisingly deep: in fact in his paper “Ancient Babylonian Algorithms” (click on any of the PDF links at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=108873709784335393280 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10887370978433539...) he mentions having used dictionaries of Akkadian and Sumerian to make sure his translation was accurate, and in a 2016 lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UFkH5ZlVqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UFkH5ZlVqQ or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZB9HvddQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZB9HvddQk = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4jnuCWl0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4jnuCWl0Y) he mentions learning enough Sanskrit (or at least the Devanagari script) to fix an error in the transliteration in a Wikipedia article.

svat 6y ago

This reminded me of something Knuth says about this paper (starting around 8:17) in the talk I mentioned in another comment, showing that his historical knowledge, at least on this particular topic, wasn't always so deep: > The other background to this work… In 1962 I was asked to give a talk at the ACM National Conference which was held in Syracuse, and this [slide] was the review that occurred in Datamation. And basically he pans the thing [the conference]. He says “Fortunately a large number of the society's members were unable to attend.” And he goes on and says “Well, the hotel was pretty good and there was good breakfast…” But he says here “Another paper which was titled A History of Writing Compilers”—which was mine—“was actually the history of one individual's rather limited experience with *a* compiler”. > Well, that wasn't exactly true, but it was true enough: in other words, in 1962 I didn't know about almost anything of what I'm going to tell you tonight. So I took it as “maybe, you know, if I'm going to talk about the history of something, maybe I ought to actually research it, look into it.” And so over the next few years I started learning more about this and the more I learned the more fascinating it got… More broadly though, I echo your comment about Knuth's passion for history, which goes surprisingly deep: in fact in his paper “Ancient Babylonian Algorithms” (click on any of the PDF links at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=108873709784335393280 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10887370978433539...) he mentions having used dictionaries of Akkadian and Sumerian to make sure his translation was accurate, and in a 2016 lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UFkH5ZlVqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UFkH5ZlVqQ or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZB9HvddQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZB9HvddQk = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4jnuCWl0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4jnuCWl0Y) he mentions learning enough Sanskrit (or at least the Devanagari script) to fix an error in the transliteration in a Wikipedia article.