Donald Knuth Quotes

ret 14 years ago |

2 other quotes:

Q: "If you were young again, would you start writing TeX again or would you use Microsoft Word, or another word processor?" A: "I hope to die before I have to use Microsoft Word." —Harald Koenig asking Donald Knuth, Tübingen, 2001 Oct 2.

"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."

jgrahamc 14 years ago |

I saw Knuth talk at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park some years ago. Someone asked him which language was better Java or C++. He replied: "Whichever has the better debugger".

AndrewDucker 14 years ago | |

Now _that_ is wisdom. It's the tooling that's important, of which the language is only one part.

jiggy2011 14 years ago | |

Are most debuggers now equivalent nowadays?

All I need it to do is set breakpoints and inspect variable/memory values.

zvrba 14 years ago | | |

No, they aren't. With Java you can change code while the application is running and it will be hot-swapped after you have recompiled it.

I learned about this feature when playing a bit in Eclipse, forgot to kill the program between edits, and got a warning that the recompiled class couldn't be hot-swapped because its signature changed. And then I sat there in awe; I can just dream about this functioning reliably with C++.

rieter 14 years ago | | |

Microsoft Visual C++ supported "Edit and Continue" for many many years.

seabee 14 years ago | | |

I remember using this in MSVC 6 - so at least 14 years ago.

zvrba 14 years ago | | |

"Supports", "works" and "is usable" are three totally different things. I doubt that E&C is truly usable since even much simpler things -- for example, data breakpoints when debugging native+managed code -- is unsupported in VS2010. (Needed exactly that today.) E&C is disabled also for C# as soon as you turn on native-code debugging.

zdouglas 14 years ago | | |

Edit & continue is available with the V8 engine as well, so add JavaScript to the list of languages being unrighteously ignored.

nosse 14 years ago |

"The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located. - Donald Knuth"

This is so true. It also applies in any factory and any construction site and any dorm-room.