Slashdot Mirror
Knuth Releases Another Part of Volume 4
junge_m writes "Donald Knuth has released another of his by now famous pre-fascicles to Volume 4 of his epic:
Pre-fascicle 2c is all about 'Generating all Combinations' supplementing his pre-fascicles 2a and 2b.
Furthermore he challenges us all to do more of his daunting exercises and report our success. He thinks we are way too lazy in this respect! So come on slashdot crowd: Do your homework and get the credit from the grandmaster himself!"
The main reason that I have been hesitant to purchase and slog through these books has been the fact that they are written with an outdated assembly language for a non existant processor. I realize that the point is to learn these algorithms, however, since I rarely if ever code on that level any longer, is there an alternative? Something using a language like Java, Python, or even, ack! , 'C' would be more to my liking.
No flames please. This is just an honest question.
Thanks
Wow. No flame intended, but I never expected to hear Knuth called "this guy". For those that don't know the name, here are a few others you might want to check out: Turing, Minsky, Church, Shannon, Chomsky. Of course, these are just the "theory" guys and I am sure others will add to that list. Seems to me any geek should have at least a Readers Digest knowledge of who these people are and what they've done for us.
Devon
My favorite Knuth quote, when he gave a class a snippet of code to use in their program (not verbatim, sorry):
"Be careful with this code; I have only proven it correct, not tested it."
A demonstration of Hacker Nature:
He wasn't happy with the typesetting on his first book, and decided this should be done by computer, so he wrote a markup language for typesetting.
Of course, he wanted to do it right, so this took him... well... about a decade. And when he was done, he had written TeX. He was very pleased; his publishers thought this was odd, as the new typesetting looked worse than the old.
A few years later, high-resolution laser printers became available; TeX already suppported them, and lo and behold, the new version did look better.
TeX is a huge monster of a programming language/application. Knuth offered a cash prize of $(2^N) for the Nth unique bug report. TeX is now, like, 20 years old, and that system cost him under $1K.
If programmers were Jedi, he would be Yoda.
If programmers were wizards, he was be Gandalf.
He is the serious, friendly grandfather who can kick the butts of all us whippersnapers. So pay attention!