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We may not want to regard Knuth's latest volume, V 4B, in the The Art of Computer Programming series as a book authored only over the last couple of years, but,

by adg001 4y ago

We may not want to regard Knuth's latest volume, V 4B, in the The Art of Computer Programming series as a book authored only over the last couple of years, but, yeah, it has just gone into print [0]; HN reaction here [1]. [0] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#v4b https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#v4b [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082128

dev_0 4y ago
It’s useless in real life
- nnoitra 4y ago
  useless everywhere basically. No sane person would sit down and read TAOCP.
  - bear8642 4y ago
    Hard disagree - I'd consider it the encyclopedia of Computer Science. Yes, might not be great to read in entirety but found very useful exploring some search algorithms recently - KMP and Boyer-Moore both explored in the excruciating detail I needed
  - dev_0 4y ago
    It's damn hard to read. There are better writers
- a_w 4y ago
  "Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did. "Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it. "Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book? "Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does." https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
ilovhn 4y ago
Who reads this... and why. Some passion is involved i guess.

by adg001 4y ago

dev_0 4y ago

It’s useless in real life

nnoitra 4y ago
useless everywhere basically. No sane person would sit down and read TAOCP.
- bear8642 4y ago
  Hard disagree - I'd consider it the encyclopedia of Computer Science. Yes, might not be great to read in entirety but found very useful exploring some search algorithms recently - KMP and Boyer-Moore both explored in the excruciating detail I needed
- dev_0 4y ago
  It's damn hard to read. There are better writers
a_w 4y ago
"Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did. "Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it. "Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book? "Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does." https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

ilovhn 4y ago

Who reads this... and why. Some passion is involved i guess.