12 ms·

The Tears of Donald Knuth

180 points by mrry 12y ago

WalterBright 12y ago
I find that most history books on technology appear to focus on everything but the technology. For example, books on the Wright bros. show very little understanding of the technical achievement of the Wrights. They enumerate places, dates, and trivia of their personal lives. History books on locomotives contain arcana on the numbers painted on the side, production figures, schedules, and very very little on the engineering advances. Same with airplanes. Etc.
- jychang 12y ago
  Wow, you're right. I've never noticed as such, but in retrospect very little info on history that is designed to be mass consumed actually contains historical notes that include the technological advance itself. Does anyone know of resources (books, websites, etc) on historical advances that does actually cover the technology?
- itissid 12y ago
  The problem begins to happen a lot in school where history is taught the way it is. At least back home in India the way history books read, you needed to know only two things: 1. A timeline where you ought to remember what happened before and after that thing. 2. Objectify events based on causal reasoning presented in the books itself. For example "America got dragged into WWII because of an unprovoked attack by Japan that caused a massive loss of life and military resources" And the share volume of world history covered in a year or so makes it so hard to do any justice to a topic.
  - mikestew 12y ago
    Mostly related to #2, that's what most annoyed me about school-taught history. Sure, the Japanese, just for the hell of it, spend a bunch of money sending planes to Hawaii and that's how poor ol' innocent United States ended up in WWII. C'mon, why did the Japanese do it? It wasn't until years later that I learned anything about a blockade in the Pacific. I mean I can understand a little "America: fuck yeah!" attitude, but no one thought to mention that little tidbit? The entire planet gets into a war in the early 1900s because some two-bit archduke of something-or-other got shot? WTF? Woah, back up there, Teach; you've got some explaining to do. (And when I read the explanation years later, I still go "WTF?") Point is, if the cliche is correct then we're doomed to repeat history again and again because there seems to be little effort to explain why things happened. What the hell was the U. S. doing in some dot on the map in Southeast Asia in the 60s? Domino theory? C'mon, I doubt anyone believed that even at the time if a ten-year old version of myself is saying, "how dumb do you think I am?" But, as you mention, it would seem that there's little enough time to teach the timeline, let alone explain the treaty situation of early 1900s Europe such that WWI makes sense.
    - acscott 12y ago
      from wikipedia: "The attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and hence protect Japan's advance into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, where it sought access to natural resources such as oil and rubber." The cause of war is not usually taught. It's the events that led up to war that is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on...
    - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
      I guess we had a pretty good history teacher. She drilled into our minds that any important historical event usually had an underlying cause, a corroborating cause and a triggering cause (and often more than one of each category). So for instance on WWI, we learnt not only about Archduke Ferdinand and the Serbian "Black Hand" movement, but also about the geopolitical frictions that already existed between Austria-Hungary and Russia over the Balkan situation, etc.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        That's brilliant! How much more useful than arguing over the 'great man' theory etc. Just lay out the causes and understand how they contribute. Btw I was at the WWI memorial in Kansas City (created just a few years after the war) and they list Darwin as a cause of the war! The leaders of the world had read his "Origin of the Species". It was variously interpreted politically to mean 'the strongest culture will win' and used by the German leadership to justify war. War was natural, it would winnow the nations down to just those worthy of survival, and Germany was the most worthy.
        digi_owl 12y ago
        Eugenics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
- rst 12y ago
  Exceptions are rare enough to get called out for praise. A few: Digital Apollo, by David Mindell (development of Apollo guidance and avionics generally) The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop (technical development leading up to the Arpanet, thence to the Internet) Colossus, the secrets of Bletchley Park's codebreaking computers, by Jack Copeland et al. Unfortunately, there's a lot more of the technically unsophisticated junk that Knuth is complaining about, and the excuses offered here rather badly miss the point. ("The history of software is not the history of computer science". Yes, and so? How does a history of software from which all technical detail has been drained away contribute anything of value?)
  - sanxiyn 12y ago
    The original article also calls out such praises in the paragraph starting with "The truth is that regrettably little history of computer science, whether dumb or deep, has been written by trained historians". Let me reiterate one recommendation in particular, Mechanizing Proof, by Donald MacKenzie. This is a superb introduction to the technical subject of formal methods as well as a superb history! My only regret is that it was published in 2001 and a lot happened in the last decade. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mechanizing-proof http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mechanizing-proof
    - codemac 12y ago
      Are there any other works like this? ... I just bought it, and I want to learn what has happened since 2001.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    "Ignition" by Clark is another exceptional exception.
    - termain 12y ago
      Ignition is fantastic and I'm continuously surprised how unknown it is amongst the engine folk at MSFC.
- nullc 12y ago
  I had a delightful time reading "A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System".
- rsync 12y ago
  Racing the beam. About the atari 2600. Even the title is a technical treatment of the subject.
- jmnicolas 12y ago
  By dumbing it down, it makes the book readable by a wider audience == more sales.
- romaniv 12y ago
  I have noticed the same thing in a different context. When I was still in college, many art classes were essentially about historic trivia, paying absolutely no attention to the intent of the artists, the ideas they tried to express, and what they said about their own work. It was 99% about context and maybe 1% about content. The art was treated as a kind of societal byproduct. Now that you have mentioned it, inventors and technology are treated in a similar fashion. Not sure why. Maybe because historic biographies adopt their methodology from general history where kings and generals are simply dots in a larger picture that does try to describe the society of the time?
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Another reason may be that humans are in the end social animals...
- alan-crowe 12y ago
  For the Wright bros. I recommend "Inventing flight" by John D. Anderson, Jr.
mcguire 12y ago
[1] seems to be the paper Knuth is discussing. [2] is the link for the IEEE, but you're not getting the full text from them. (Weirdly, the top hit for Cambell-Kelly himself is [3], which only has a link to track his research proposals. Warwick's keeping their eyes on the ball, I guess.) [1] http://www.thecorememory.com/THTHS.pdf http://www.thecorememory.com/THTHS.pdf [2] http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2007/04/man2007040040-abs.html http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2007/04/man2007040040-a... [3] http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/martin_campbell-kelly/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/martin_campbell...
- abecedarius 12y ago
  Thanks for the link. The section on emulation and simulation struck me as patronizing and narrow.
  - fungos 12y ago
    Exactly. To me that section was a total demonstration of narrow minded personal opinion.
- Animats 12y ago
  [1] does seem to be the paper of interest. It's not clear what Knuth is unhappy about. Campbell-Kelly's big complaint seems to be that the early history of computing mentions machines, languages, and algorithms too much, and doesn't discuss applications and users enough. That's a reasonable comment from a historian. When Knuth wrote Vol. I, "Fundamental Algorithms", there were almost no computer books published other than manufacturer manuals and a few introductory programming language books. Knuth's series is really a history of algorithms, with each one traced back to its originator. The early history is on the record. We're now inundated with corporate histories, mostly of applications companies. There's a glut of CEO biographies. There are academic papers on the history of the spreadsheet. There's no longer a lack of history on the user-facing side. This comes with progress in the field. A book-length history of the electric motor, from Henry to Edison to Sprague to Tesla and up to modern brushless motors, would be interesting - to a very small number of people. Popular articles on motors can be found in mainstream publications from 1880 to 1925 or so. After that, they were just routine items, not newsworthy. Low-level algorithms now belong in that category. A few people still have to study how to do hash tables, just as a few people have to study rotating electrical machinery theory and design new motors. The important thing is not to lose the history. Campbell-Kelly says "we can't save everything". Well, we can. Disk space is cheap. Future generations (of humans and machines) can re-summarize it.
vvpan 12y ago
Non-mobile version has readable font size and color. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-don...
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  This redirects to the mobile version for me :|
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    I use Firefox with Noscript. To see the desktop version I had to 'temporarily allow all this page' in the Noscript options.
- Stratoscope 12y ago
  Thank you! That link just redirected to the mobile version on my Galaxy Note 3, but you reminded me to try the "Request desktop site" option which worked fine. It's funny that the mobile site is completely unreadable on a mobile device, where the desktop version formats cleanly on mobile and is much easier to read!
- jackmaney 12y ago
  Holy crap, thank you. The article linked by OP was hurting my eyes. Who creates a website where the body has no margin? And light-gray text on a white background? What were they thinking?
  - joshuacc 12y ago
    Lack of margin actually helps readability on older mobile devices. Not sure why they'd go with those colors, though.
- lukastsai 12y ago
  I would recommend my tool which have a readable view. https://getscroll.com/r/avjsa https://getscroll.com/r/avjsa
mcguire 12y ago
"So why is the history of computer science not being written \(in the volume it deserves\), or \(the manner favored by Knuth\)?" \\1 Too many principals of said history are still alive, still influential, and still kicking too much to allow much in the way of historical analysis. It is much easier for a historian to stick with a subject where those who remember events are safely dead. \\2 It would be improper to expect anyone to write informatively about ideas they cannot themselves understand. And it would be improper (as the author of the article writes) to expect a historian to understand an unrelated technical field. This is unfortunate, because "history", the preferences of historians notwithstanding, is the story of technology. I do not believe there is any great difference between any of us and some goober fingerpainting on the walls of a cave.
- graycat 12y ago
  Goober had to have been making good, even crucial, use of his mental abilities or we would not have ours. So, what the heck was Goober doing with his abilities that were crucial? He found the cave, kept out animals that could hurt him, built a fire to keep it warm, built families, found food and water, make tools, weapons, and clothes, etc. Apparently found good uses for his brain.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    And found the leisure time, materials and learned the skills required required to do some fingerpainting on the side (assuming the subject of the painting did not have practical or religious purposes).
- zenogais 12y ago
  Have to take issue with your analysis here. For an appropriately empty conception of technology, we can perhaps view history as "the story of technology". Whether this has much explanatory power, however, is another question. Really, though, I suspect this is just a popular contemporary bias mostly among technologists, just as in the Christian world of the middle ages history was biblical history.
- chipsy 12y ago
cryptophreak 12y ago
Mirror?
- UNIXgod 12y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
pmcjones 12y ago
For scans of much of the historic software source code that Knuth mentions near the end of the video, see: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/KnuthDigitalArchive-Index.html http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_...
yarapavan 12y ago
Here is the web/non-mobile version (OP posted mobile version): http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-don...
gdwatson 12y ago
What would it take to get Computer Science departments to view the history of the discipline as an important issue to be dealt with inside the department? Surely the author's right that if the technical history of a discipline is to be done in the way Knuth wants, and I think that is incredibly valuable, it needs to be done by those who understand the discipline. But can C.S. departments manage that as an institutional matter?

180 points by mrry 12y ago

I find that most history books on technology appear to focus on everything but the technology. For example, books on the Wright bros. show very little understanding of the technical achievement of the Wrights. They enumerate places, dates, and trivia of their personal lives. History books on locomotives contain arcana on the numbers painted on the side, production figures, schedules, and very very little on the engineering advances. Same with airplanes. Etc.

jychang 12y ago
Wow, you're right. I've never noticed as such, but in retrospect very little info on history that is designed to be mass consumed actually contains historical notes that include the technological advance itself. Does anyone know of resources (books, websites, etc) on historical advances that does actually cover the technology?
itissid 12y ago
The problem begins to happen a lot in school where history is taught the way it is. At least back home in India the way history books read, you needed to know only two things: 1. A timeline where you ought to remember what happened before and after that thing. 2. Objectify events based on causal reasoning presented in the books itself. For example "America got dragged into WWII because of an unprovoked attack by Japan that caused a massive loss of life and military resources" And the share volume of world history covered in a year or so makes it so hard to do any justice to a topic.
- mikestew 12y ago
  Mostly related to #2, that's what most annoyed me about school-taught history. Sure, the Japanese, just for the hell of it, spend a bunch of money sending planes to Hawaii and that's how poor ol' innocent United States ended up in WWII. C'mon, why did the Japanese do it? It wasn't until years later that I learned anything about a blockade in the Pacific. I mean I can understand a little "America: fuck yeah!" attitude, but no one thought to mention that little tidbit? The entire planet gets into a war in the early 1900s because some two-bit archduke of something-or-other got shot? WTF? Woah, back up there, Teach; you've got some explaining to do. (And when I read the explanation years later, I still go "WTF?") Point is, if the cliche is correct then we're doomed to repeat history again and again because there seems to be little effort to explain why things happened. What the hell was the U. S. doing in some dot on the map in Southeast Asia in the 60s? Domino theory? C'mon, I doubt anyone believed that even at the time if a ten-year old version of myself is saying, "how dumb do you think I am?" But, as you mention, it would seem that there's little enough time to teach the timeline, let alone explain the treaty situation of early 1900s Europe such that WWI makes sense.
  - acscott 12y ago
    from wikipedia: "The attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and hence protect Japan's advance into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, where it sought access to natural resources such as oil and rubber." The cause of war is not usually taught. It's the events that led up to war that is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on...
  - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
    I guess we had a pretty good history teacher. She drilled into our minds that any important historical event usually had an underlying cause, a corroborating cause and a triggering cause (and often more than one of each category). So for instance on WWI, we learnt not only about Archduke Ferdinand and the Serbian "Black Hand" movement, but also about the geopolitical frictions that already existed between Austria-Hungary and Russia over the Balkan situation, etc.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      That's brilliant! How much more useful than arguing over the 'great man' theory etc. Just lay out the causes and understand how they contribute. Btw I was at the WWI memorial in Kansas City (created just a few years after the war) and they list Darwin as a cause of the war! The leaders of the world had read his "Origin of the Species". It was variously interpreted politically to mean 'the strongest culture will win' and used by the German leadership to justify war. War was natural, it would winnow the nations down to just those worthy of survival, and Germany was the most worthy.
      - digi_owl 12y ago
        Eugenics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
rst 12y ago
Exceptions are rare enough to get called out for praise. A few: Digital Apollo, by David Mindell (development of Apollo guidance and avionics generally) The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop (technical development leading up to the Arpanet, thence to the Internet) Colossus, the secrets of Bletchley Park's codebreaking computers, by Jack Copeland et al. Unfortunately, there's a lot more of the technically unsophisticated junk that Knuth is complaining about, and the excuses offered here rather badly miss the point. ("The history of software is not the history of computer science". Yes, and so? How does a history of software from which all technical detail has been drained away contribute anything of value?)
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  The original article also calls out such praises in the paragraph starting with "The truth is that regrettably little history of computer science, whether dumb or deep, has been written by trained historians". Let me reiterate one recommendation in particular, Mechanizing Proof, by Donald MacKenzie. This is a superb introduction to the technical subject of formal methods as well as a superb history! My only regret is that it was published in 2001 and a lot happened in the last decade. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mechanizing-proof http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mechanizing-proof
  - codemac 12y ago
    Are there any other works like this? ... I just bought it, and I want to learn what has happened since 2001.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  "Ignition" by Clark is another exceptional exception.
  - termain 12y ago
    Ignition is fantastic and I'm continuously surprised how unknown it is amongst the engine folk at MSFC.
nullc 12y ago
I had a delightful time reading "A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System".
rsync 12y ago
Racing the beam. About the atari 2600. Even the title is a technical treatment of the subject.
jmnicolas 12y ago
By dumbing it down, it makes the book readable by a wider audience == more sales.
romaniv 12y ago
I have noticed the same thing in a different context. When I was still in college, many art classes were essentially about historic trivia, paying absolutely no attention to the intent of the artists, the ideas they tried to express, and what they said about their own work. It was 99% about context and maybe 1% about content. The art was treated as a kind of societal byproduct. Now that you have mentioned it, inventors and technology are treated in a similar fashion. Not sure why. Maybe because historic biographies adopt their methodology from general history where kings and generals are simply dots in a larger picture that does try to describe the society of the time?
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Another reason may be that humans are in the end social animals...
alan-crowe 12y ago
For the Wright bros. I recommend "Inventing flight" by John D. Anderson, Jr.

mcguire 12y ago

[1] seems to be the paper Knuth is discussing. [2] is the link for the IEEE, but you're not getting the full text from them. (Weirdly, the top hit for Cambell-Kelly himself is [3], which only has a link to track his research proposals. Warwick's keeping their eyes on the ball, I guess.) [1] http://www.thecorememory.com/THTHS.pdf http://www.thecorememory.com/THTHS.pdf [2] http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2007/04/man2007040040-abs.html http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2007/04/man2007040040-a... [3] http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/martin_campbell-kelly/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/martin_campbell...

abecedarius 12y ago
Thanks for the link. The section on emulation and simulation struck me as patronizing and narrow.
- fungos 12y ago
  Exactly. To me that section was a total demonstration of narrow minded personal opinion.
Animats 12y ago
[1] does seem to be the paper of interest. It's not clear what Knuth is unhappy about. Campbell-Kelly's big complaint seems to be that the early history of computing mentions machines, languages, and algorithms too much, and doesn't discuss applications and users enough. That's a reasonable comment from a historian. When Knuth wrote Vol. I, "Fundamental Algorithms", there were almost no computer books published other than manufacturer manuals and a few introductory programming language books. Knuth's series is really a history of algorithms, with each one traced back to its originator. The early history is on the record. We're now inundated with corporate histories, mostly of applications companies. There's a glut of CEO biographies. There are academic papers on the history of the spreadsheet. There's no longer a lack of history on the user-facing side. This comes with progress in the field. A book-length history of the electric motor, from Henry to Edison to Sprague to Tesla and up to modern brushless motors, would be interesting - to a very small number of people. Popular articles on motors can be found in mainstream publications from 1880 to 1925 or so. After that, they were just routine items, not newsworthy. Low-level algorithms now belong in that category. A few people still have to study how to do hash tables, just as a few people have to study rotating electrical machinery theory and design new motors. The important thing is not to lose the history. Campbell-Kelly says "we can't save everything". Well, we can. Disk space is cheap. Future generations (of humans and machines) can re-summarize it.

vvpan 12y ago

Non-mobile version has readable font size and color. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-don...

sarciszewski 12y ago
This redirects to the mobile version for me :|
- keithpeter 12y ago
  I use Firefox with Noscript. To see the desktop version I had to 'temporarily allow all this page' in the Noscript options.
Stratoscope 12y ago
Thank you! That link just redirected to the mobile version on my Galaxy Note 3, but you reminded me to try the "Request desktop site" option which worked fine. It's funny that the mobile site is completely unreadable on a mobile device, where the desktop version formats cleanly on mobile and is much easier to read!
jackmaney 12y ago
Holy crap, thank you. The article linked by OP was hurting my eyes. Who creates a website where the body has no margin? And light-gray text on a white background? What were they thinking?
- joshuacc 12y ago
  Lack of margin actually helps readability on older mobile devices. Not sure why they'd go with those colors, though.
lukastsai 12y ago
I would recommend my tool which have a readable view. https://getscroll.com/r/avjsa https://getscroll.com/r/avjsa

mcguire 12y ago

"So why is the history of computer science not being written \(in the volume it deserves\), or \(the manner favored by Knuth\)?" \\1 Too many principals of said history are still alive, still influential, and still kicking too much to allow much in the way of historical analysis. It is much easier for a historian to stick with a subject where those who remember events are safely dead. \\2 It would be improper to expect anyone to write informatively about ideas they cannot themselves understand. And it would be improper (as the author of the article writes) to expect a historian to understand an unrelated technical field. This is unfortunate, because "history", the preferences of historians notwithstanding, is the story of technology. I do not believe there is any great difference between any of us and some goober fingerpainting on the walls of a cave.

graycat 12y ago
Goober had to have been making good, even crucial, use of his mental abilities or we would not have ours. So, what the heck was Goober doing with his abilities that were crucial? He found the cave, kept out animals that could hurt him, built a fire to keep it warm, built families, found food and water, make tools, weapons, and clothes, etc. Apparently found good uses for his brain.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  And found the leisure time, materials and learned the skills required required to do some fingerpainting on the side (assuming the subject of the painting did not have practical or religious purposes).
zenogais 12y ago
Have to take issue with your analysis here. For an appropriately empty conception of technology, we can perhaps view history as "the story of technology". Whether this has much explanatory power, however, is another question. Really, though, I suspect this is just a popular contemporary bias mostly among technologists, just as in the Christian world of the middle ages history was biblical history.
chipsy 12y ago

cryptophreak 12y ago

Mirror?

UNIXgod 12y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

pmcjones 12y ago

For scans of much of the historic software source code that Knuth mentions near the end of the video, see: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/KnuthDigitalArchive-Index.html http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_...

yarapavan 12y ago

Here is the web/non-mobile version (OP posted mobile version): http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-don...

gdwatson 12y ago

What would it take to get Computer Science departments to view the history of the discipline as an important issue to be dealt with inside the department? Surely the author's right that if the technical history of a discipline is to be done in the way Knuth wants, and I think that is incredibly valuable, it needs to be done by those who understand the discipline. But can C.S. departments manage that as an institutional matter?