4 ms·

The Tears of Donald Knuth (2015)

81 points by todsacerdoti 8mo ago

atomic128 8mo ago
Imagine Knuth's heartbreak when he sees how LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime. Has he commented on the topic? Anyone have a link?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
  He is still alive (I think?) you could just ask him. I doubt he is sad as much as he is excited. Computer scientists are not SWEs worried about losing their careers.
  - atomic128 8mo ago
    Excited? I doubt that. I'm guessing you haven't read his books.
    - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
      The techno pessimists on HN are probably not PhDs in computer science. I don’t think they understand what it takes to get there, and how it shapes your thinking afterwards.
      - defrost 8mo ago
        Neither Wolf nor Knuth are PhDs in Computer Science, yet many would agree that both understand "what it takes to get there" as do many others who else live sans a PhD in Comp. Sci.
        robotresearcher 8mo ago
        Needlessly pedantic. Knuth's PhD is in mathematics, like Alan Turing, and many other significant computer scientists.
        defrost 8mo ago
        > Needlessly pedantic. You don't have to pre warn readers about your comments here, we're all needlessly pedantic. That aside, the guts of this sub branch is the correlation between {techno pessimists on HN} and {people qualified to understand LLM's (workings and implications)}. Personally I wouldn't limit set two to "PhDs in computer science" or even accept that {all PhD's in Comp Sci} is a subset of set two, as I made clear with my comment, nor would I argue a lack of overlap between sets one and two. I'm interested to hear where you stand.
    - CharlesW 8mo ago
      He seems pretty fascinated with the possibilities. https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt
      - atomic128 8mo ago
        "I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same. Best regards, Don"
        CharlesW 8mo ago
        There's more than one cherry to pick if one needs Mr. Knuth to have a purely-negative opinion about LLMs, but naturally any fascination is offset by the same concerns that any sane technologist has. In any case, it's all in his post.
  - linguae 8mo ago
    He’s still here. In fact, in December he gave his annual Christmas lecture, and last month he was a guest at a Computer History Museum event.
  - add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago
    Hopefully some are visionary enough to be dismayed that the endgame of their field is the acceleration of slop and fraud, the end of customer service, and the end of the reading of full, original documents. I can't imagine being excited about any of that unless I was trying to make money from it.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      > the end of the reading of full, original documents That's one that always gets me: people who use LLMs to summarize everything. It's like, bro, how lazy are you that you can't be bothered to read a handful of paragraphs of text? That takes all of 30 seconds. I can understand trying to get a computer to summarize a document which is dozens of pages long (though I would be concerned about hallucinations), but a lot of the tasks people use LLMs for are really easy already.
- johngunderman 8mo ago
  While I can't speak for Knuth, I have been reflecting on the fact that developing with a modern LLM seems to be an evolution of the concept of Literate Programming that Knuth has long been a proponent of. What is the rationale behind the assertion that Knuth would be so fundamentally opposed to the use of LLMs in development?
  - atomic128 8mo ago
    I don't see the connection. In literate programming you meticulously write code (as usual) but present it to a human reader as an essay: as a web of code chunks connected together in a well-defined manner with plenty of informal comments describing your thinking process and the "story" of the program. You write your program but also structure it for other humans to read and to understand. LLM software development tends to abandon human understanding. It tends to abandon tight abstractions that manage complexity.
    - rixed 8mo ago
      Have you ever tried literate programming? In literate programming you do not write the code then present it to a human reader. You describe your goal, assess various ideas and justify the chosen plan (and oftentimes change your mind in the process), and only after, once the plan is clear, you start to write any code. Thus the similarity with using LLM. Working with LLMs is quicker though, not only because you do not write the code but you don't care much about the style of the prose. On the other hand, the code has to be reviewed, debugged and polished. So, Ymmv.
      - phba 8mo ago
        > In literate programming you do not write the code then present it to a human reader. You describe your goal, assess various ideas and justify the chosen plan (and oftentimes change your mind in the process), and only after, once the plan is clear, you start to write any code. This is not literate programming. The main idea behind literate programming is to explain to a human what you want a computer to do. Code and literate explanations are developed side by side. You certainly don't change your mind in the process (lol). > Working with LLMs is quicker though Yes, because you neither invest time into understanding the problem nor conveying your understanding to other humans, which is the whole point of literate programming. But don't take my word, just read the original.[1] [1] https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programming/01-knuth-lp.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...
- simonw 8mo ago
  https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt is a conversation between Knuth and Wolfram about GPT-4. > I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a "singularity" in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost. > I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.
  - sethev 8mo ago
    I don't know why but it makes me smile that he did this experiment by having a grad student type the questions for chatgpt and copy the results.
  - atomic128 8mo ago
    That's related. Thank you for posting it. But what does Knuth think of "vibe coding" or "agentic coding"? What does he think of "The Dawn of the Dark Ages of Computer Programming"?
    - jacquesm 8mo ago
      I don't think Knuth needs to stoop that low. He actually knows what he's doing.
  - ghssds 8mo ago
    > not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost. Aren't Asimov's Multivac stories basicaly this? Humans build a powerful computer with a conversational interface helping them doing all kind of science and stuff, then before they know they become Multivac's pets.
  - 8mo ago
- Razengan 8mo ago
  > …LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime. If you see magazines articles or TV shows and ads from the 1980s (a fun rabbit hole on YouTube, like the BBC Archive), the general promise was that "Computers can do anything, if you just program them." Well, nobody could figure out how to program them. (except the outcasts like us who went on to suffer for the rest of our lives for it :') OS makers like Microsoft/Apple/etc all had their own ideas about how we should make apps and none of them wanted to work together and still don't. With phones & "AI" everywhere we are actually closer to that original promise of everyone having a computer and being able to do anything with it, that isn't solely dictated by corporations and their prepackaged apps: Ideally ChatGPT etc should be able to create interactive apps on the fly on your iPhone etc. Imagine having a specific need and just being able to say it and get a custom app right away just for you on your device.
  - atomic128 8mo ago
    Past progress in software engineering is a tower of well-defined abstractions. Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code. Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals. This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks. That era is ending.
    - rixed 8mo ago
      That era ended 20 years ago. It's called "industrialization", a process that has happened to many other crafts in the past. AI is just the latest blow.
    - Razengan 8mo ago
      ...is that comment written by an LLM? Human programmers are frequently hamstrung by human politics and economies. Hell, even major developers like Google and Facebook still fight against letting iPhone apps run on iPad, for example. YouTube still doesn't support Picture-in-Picture on iPad. It took YEARs for some big apps to just adopt Dark Mode. The best paid programmers on the planet, wtf? If the power of AI isn't artificially crippled I could be able to just say "Make me a native app for browsing {DumbWebsiteThatRefusesToProvideAnApp}" or "Fix HN's crap formatting" and just get on with my life the way I want without having to beg or fight our Corpo Gods.
- asddubs 8mo ago
  You might enjoy this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc The connection to knuth is tangential to the actual video subject, but it does contrast knuth to LLMs as a framing device
  - lioeters 8mo ago
    An hour later. Wow that was quite a rabbit hole, I return a fan of Tom 7, surfing the edge of mad genius. http://tom7.org/ http://tom7.org/
smitty1e 8mo ago
Title should note that this is a 2015 post.
oh_my_goodness 8mo ago
What a weird, bitchy article. Knuth might be wrong but I gave up.
- the-grump 8mo ago
  Same reaction. I can't even say the author is correct/wrong because I couldn't get through it.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - benreesman 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Razengan 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - benreesman 8mo ago
        A PhD caliber thesis with devastating epistenics about failures that have claimed conservatively a dozen lives is going gray on an 18 year old account but this shit is fine. @dang, I'm now threatening to buy a massive oppo campaign with immaculate data and OpenAI's fundraise hanging by a thread. Fix it or I'll fix it.
        benreesman 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        dang 8mo ago
        Would you please stop posting like this?
kazinator 8mo ago
LinkedIn version of the history of CS: In the beginning was assembly language, then we got C, followed by C++ bringing in OOP and Java making it safe, ...
gnabgib 8mo ago
(2015) At the time (180 points, 55 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796212
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
svat 8mo ago
The 2014 talk of Knuth that is being discussed (transcription published later in 2021): “Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science”: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/lets-not-dumb-down-the-history-of-computer-science/ https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/lets-not-dumb-down-the-history-... HN discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907481

81 points by todsacerdoti 8mo ago

Imagine Knuth's heartbreak when he sees how LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime. Has he commented on the topic? Anyone have a link?

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
He is still alive (I think?) you could just ask him. I doubt he is sad as much as he is excited. Computer scientists are not SWEs worried about losing their careers.
- atomic128 8mo ago
  Excited? I doubt that. I'm guessing you haven't read his books.
  - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
    The techno pessimists on HN are probably not PhDs in computer science. I don’t think they understand what it takes to get there, and how it shapes your thinking afterwards.
    - defrost 8mo ago
      Neither Wolf nor Knuth are PhDs in Computer Science, yet many would agree that both understand "what it takes to get there" as do many others who else live sans a PhD in Comp. Sci.
      - robotresearcher 8mo ago
        Needlessly pedantic. Knuth's PhD is in mathematics, like Alan Turing, and many other significant computer scientists.
        defrost 8mo ago
        > Needlessly pedantic. You don't have to pre warn readers about your comments here, we're all needlessly pedantic. That aside, the guts of this sub branch is the correlation between {techno pessimists on HN} and {people qualified to understand LLM's (workings and implications)}. Personally I wouldn't limit set two to "PhDs in computer science" or even accept that {all PhD's in Comp Sci} is a subset of set two, as I made clear with my comment, nor would I argue a lack of overlap between sets one and two. I'm interested to hear where you stand.
  - CharlesW 8mo ago
    He seems pretty fascinated with the possibilities. https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt
    - atomic128 8mo ago
      "I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same. Best regards, Don"
      - CharlesW 8mo ago
        There's more than one cherry to pick if one needs Mr. Knuth to have a purely-negative opinion about LLMs, but naturally any fascination is offset by the same concerns that any sane technologist has. In any case, it's all in his post.
- linguae 8mo ago
  He’s still here. In fact, in December he gave his annual Christmas lecture, and last month he was a guest at a Computer History Museum event.
- add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago
  Hopefully some are visionary enough to be dismayed that the endgame of their field is the acceleration of slop and fraud, the end of customer service, and the end of the reading of full, original documents. I can't imagine being excited about any of that unless I was trying to make money from it.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
    > the end of the reading of full, original documents That's one that always gets me: people who use LLMs to summarize everything. It's like, bro, how lazy are you that you can't be bothered to read a handful of paragraphs of text? That takes all of 30 seconds. I can understand trying to get a computer to summarize a document which is dozens of pages long (though I would be concerned about hallucinations), but a lot of the tasks people use LLMs for are really easy already.
johngunderman 8mo ago
While I can't speak for Knuth, I have been reflecting on the fact that developing with a modern LLM seems to be an evolution of the concept of Literate Programming that Knuth has long been a proponent of. What is the rationale behind the assertion that Knuth would be so fundamentally opposed to the use of LLMs in development?
- atomic128 8mo ago
  I don't see the connection. In literate programming you meticulously write code (as usual) but present it to a human reader as an essay: as a web of code chunks connected together in a well-defined manner with plenty of informal comments describing your thinking process and the "story" of the program. You write your program but also structure it for other humans to read and to understand. LLM software development tends to abandon human understanding. It tends to abandon tight abstractions that manage complexity.
  - rixed 8mo ago
    Have you ever tried literate programming? In literate programming you do not write the code then present it to a human reader. You describe your goal, assess various ideas and justify the chosen plan (and oftentimes change your mind in the process), and only after, once the plan is clear, you start to write any code. Thus the similarity with using LLM. Working with LLMs is quicker though, not only because you do not write the code but you don't care much about the style of the prose. On the other hand, the code has to be reviewed, debugged and polished. So, Ymmv.
    - phba 8mo ago
      > In literate programming you do not write the code then present it to a human reader. You describe your goal, assess various ideas and justify the chosen plan (and oftentimes change your mind in the process), and only after, once the plan is clear, you start to write any code. This is not literate programming. The main idea behind literate programming is to explain to a human what you want a computer to do. Code and literate explanations are developed side by side. You certainly don't change your mind in the process (lol). > Working with LLMs is quicker though Yes, because you neither invest time into understanding the problem nor conveying your understanding to other humans, which is the whole point of literate programming. But don't take my word, just read the original.[1] [1] https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programming/01-knuth-lp.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...
simonw 8mo ago
https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt is a conversation between Knuth and Wolfram about GPT-4. > I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a "singularity" in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost. > I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.
- sethev 8mo ago
  I don't know why but it makes me smile that he did this experiment by having a grad student type the questions for chatgpt and copy the results.
- atomic128 8mo ago
  That's related. Thank you for posting it. But what does Knuth think of "vibe coding" or "agentic coding"? What does he think of "The Dawn of the Dark Ages of Computer Programming"?
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    I don't think Knuth needs to stoop that low. He actually knows what he's doing.
- ghssds 8mo ago
  > not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost. Aren't Asimov's Multivac stories basicaly this? Humans build a powerful computer with a conversational interface helping them doing all kind of science and stuff, then before they know they become Multivac's pets.
- 8mo ago
Razengan 8mo ago
> …LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime. If you see magazines articles or TV shows and ads from the 1980s (a fun rabbit hole on YouTube, like the BBC Archive), the general promise was that "Computers can do anything, if you just program them." Well, nobody could figure out how to program them. (except the outcasts like us who went on to suffer for the rest of our lives for it :') OS makers like Microsoft/Apple/etc all had their own ideas about how we should make apps and none of them wanted to work together and still don't. With phones & "AI" everywhere we are actually closer to that original promise of everyone having a computer and being able to do anything with it, that isn't solely dictated by corporations and their prepackaged apps: Ideally ChatGPT etc should be able to create interactive apps on the fly on your iPhone etc. Imagine having a specific need and just being able to say it and get a custom app right away just for you on your device.
- atomic128 8mo ago
  Past progress in software engineering is a tower of well-defined abstractions. Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code. Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals. This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks. That era is ending.
  - rixed 8mo ago
    That era ended 20 years ago. It's called "industrialization", a process that has happened to many other crafts in the past. AI is just the latest blow.
  - Razengan 8mo ago
    ...is that comment written by an LLM? Human programmers are frequently hamstrung by human politics and economies. Hell, even major developers like Google and Facebook still fight against letting iPhone apps run on iPad, for example. YouTube still doesn't support Picture-in-Picture on iPad. It took YEARs for some big apps to just adopt Dark Mode. The best paid programmers on the planet, wtf? If the power of AI isn't artificially crippled I could be able to just say "Make me a native app for browsing {DumbWebsiteThatRefusesToProvideAnApp}" or "Fix HN's crap formatting" and just get on with my life the way I want without having to beg or fight our Corpo Gods.
asddubs 8mo ago
You might enjoy this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc The connection to knuth is tangential to the actual video subject, but it does contrast knuth to LLMs as a framing device
- lioeters 8mo ago
  An hour later. Wow that was quite a rabbit hole, I return a fan of Tom 7, surfing the edge of mad genius. http://tom7.org/ http://tom7.org/

smitty1e 8mo ago

Title should note that this is a 2015 post.

oh_my_goodness 8mo ago

What a weird, bitchy article. Knuth might be wrong but I gave up.

the-grump 8mo ago
Same reaction. I can't even say the author is correct/wrong because I couldn't get through it.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- benreesman 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Razengan 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - benreesman 8mo ago
      A PhD caliber thesis with devastating epistenics about failures that have claimed conservatively a dozen lives is going gray on an 18 year old account but this shit is fine. @dang, I'm now threatening to buy a massive oppo campaign with immaculate data and OpenAI's fundraise hanging by a thread. Fix it or I'll fix it.
      - benreesman 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        dang 8mo ago
        Would you please stop posting like this?

kazinator 8mo ago

LinkedIn version of the history of CS: In the beginning was assembly language, then we got C, followed by C++ bringing in OOP and Java making it safe, ...

gnabgib 8mo ago

(2015) At the time (180 points, 55 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796212

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

svat 8mo ago

The 2014 talk of Knuth that is being discussed (transcription published later in 2021): “Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science”: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/lets-not-dumb-down-the-history-of-computer-science/ https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/lets-not-dumb-down-the-history-... HN discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25907481