Donald Knuth

“היזהרו מבאגים בקוד המצורף. אני רק הוכחתי את הנכונות, לא בדקתי אותו.”

“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

“The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.”

“God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.”

“I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.”

“Email is a wonderful thing for those people whose role in life is to be on top of things, but not for me: my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

“There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.”

“I'm obsessively detail-oriented.”

“A list is only as strong as its weakest link.”

“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

“I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.”

“The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.”

“People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.”

“In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.”

“People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.”

“To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!”

“I'll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about - and if there was nothing I didn't know the answers about.”

“I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop - it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux.”