Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Vol. 4

_mutators writes "bookpool.com has posted an excerpt from Knuth's long awaited The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4. It is very short and discusses combinatorial searching. But when will it be published? Bookpool does not hazard a guess."

Comments

Additional information

[HyperChicken]

The books homepage, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.ht ml offers the fascicle for download for free. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc1.ps .gz You can still get $2.56 for each bug found, I believe.

Mirrors:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/taocp.html
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/fasc1.ps.gz

Re:Additional information

[callipygian-showsyst]

This posting is a hoax! The real Don Knuth would have it in TeX format, not PostScript.

Re:Additional information

[museumpeace]

also, the post says bookpool won't say when it will be completely published but the fascicle I read mentions the year. 2006

Re:Additional information

[Anonymous Coward]

Dragged this down and started skimming it. Felt like a kid at Christmas. Probably ought to buy it.

/.ed

[mrwoody]

The next volume will be:
"The Art of Being Slashdotted"

Re:/.ed

[sinserve]

WHAT THE!

Get the fuck off of this site your disrespectful bastard. We don't use that kind of abusive language around here.

It's been a while.

[robbyjo]

It's been a while. Dr. Knuth already finished pre-fascicle 4. Get it here. It's far from done (well, according to his plan).

Nifty from the Knuth

[gateman9]

Nifty, but mainly from the whole CS angle. And it seems a bit more approachable that the third book was, although some of that has to do with the fact that I was relatively unschooled when I first read them.

It'll be a pleasure to add it to my bookshelf.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[HyperChicken]

Adding it to your bookshelf does no good: You have to read it.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[gateman9]

Ayuh, no book makes it to my bookshelf without first having been read. Although by the time this thing comes out (2007-ish IIRC), I may need more shelving.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[EvanED]

Nah, you just have to figure out how to learn by osmosis.

Actually, on of my friends was telling me about a conversation she had about what would be a cool superpower, and suggested the ability to touch a book and instantly gain all the knowledge inside. Think of heading to the library and just running your hand down the shelves...

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[Walt Dismal]

I once went to Tibet to learn that superpower. After five years I came home, went to an adult bookstore, touched a shelf, and my head exploded.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

There was an episode of the old Steven Spielberg-prodcued TV series, Amazing Stories, that had exactly this plot. A man would instantly gain knowledge from his surroundings. He was a janitor at a local university, and (for example) would become a chemistry expert after being in the chemistry lab.

One day he went into the library and suffered as the weight of all human knowledge was jammed into him.

In the end, aliens came and collected all the knowledge out of his brain. They'd made him a knowledge sponge so that they could learn about Earth.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading it does no good: you have to understand it.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[HyperChicken]

Touché.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[mirko]

It should have been your dick, I guess you learned wrong... Or you only touched books about blowjobs :)

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[mirko]

Janitor ? Knowledge ?
It's almost kinda this movie's plot, then... If they extend it. ;-)

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the real superpower you learned was how to survive without a head?

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[andrew_j_w]

Only on Slashdot could someone get moderated Insightful for pointing out that you have a read a book to understand it...

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[rbarreira]

Yeah, and the inexcusable part is that the meta-mods marked it as Underrated :D

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[Tony Hoyle]

You've actually read a Knuth book?

Our local store actually had them on the shelves last year (probably someone ordered but never collected) - I managed to leaf through about 2 pages before realizing that without a serious maths degree (and possible a PhD in Greek) I'd have no chance of understanding more than 5% of it.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[ACPosterChild]

Well, the Amazing Stories series was on TV way before that came out.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[jericho4.0]

Knuths books are extremly well thought out, and anyone with an interest in the subject at hand can glean some usefull info and do a question or two at the end of the chapter. That 5% is often very enlightening, and guaranteed to make you a better programer.

Re:Nifty from the Knuth

[Walt Dismal]

The original SF story this was based on was written in 1955 by Richard Matheson, and is titled 'One for the Books'. Published first in Galaxy Magazine.

Many own, few read

[Ars-Fartsica]

How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf? For my money, Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest's "Introduction to Algorithms" is preferred for almost all related material you might want to investigate.

Re:Many own, few read

[Detritus]

TAOCP Volume 1, First Edition, 1968
TAOCP Volume 2, First Edition, 1969
TAOCP Volume 3, First Edition, 1973

Introduction to Algorithms, First Edition, 1990

Notice the slight gap in publication dates?

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

[I haven't read "Introduction to Algorithms", so take this with a grain of salt.] The Knuth books are about more than the algorithms: They're about philosophy of programming.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

CLR is an excellent book for classroom teaching, and a reasonable place to go as a first reference, but it has very shallow coverage of most topics. Pick a topic that Knuth and CLR both cover, and for 25% of your questions both will cover, for another 50% Knuth will but not CLR, and for the remainder neither.

Of course, Knuth is somewhat out of date. And covers a much smaller set of topics. But frankly CLR only covers a small proportion of topics too, relative to all the things one might want to explore in CS - or even in algorithms.

Re:Many own, few read

[cecom]

While I was growing up in Eastern Europe, it was completely impossible to find any of the volumes. They weren't available for sale and almost all copies had been stolen from the libraries (well, not exactly "stolen" but many people forgot to return the book and would much prefer to pay the library fine).

I eventually managed to get a hold of "Searching and Sorting" for a couple of days and I tried to read it. Needless to say, I didn't get far. One needs months to consume the whole thiing :-)

When I moved to the US, the first thing I did was to buy the series. I couldn't believe that it was actually available in stores! I have to admit though, I still haven't read the three volumes completely - ah, I miss the enthusiasm of my youth.

Didn't somebody say that one should never attempt to read the whole thing ? One should turn to a specific section and read it only when the need arises. That makes me feel better :-)

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

The Knuth books are about more than the algorithms: They're about philosophy of programming.

No, they really aren't. They are about algorithms.

Knuth isn't God. His books aren't the Bible. He's just a computer science professor who wrote some books on the topic of algorithms.

Yes, the books are thorough. Yes, they are dense and information packed. But no, they aren't the be-all and end-all of Computer Science.

You may now mod me down for speaking heresy.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not speaking heresy. That's quite exact and true.

Some other books do a much better job at conveying the philosophy of programming, (for example SICP).

Re:Many own, few read

[miu]

There are at least a couple of important subjects where the use of MIX in AoCP makes a subject more immediately accessible than Intro Algorithms.

I do agree that there are probably quite a few copies of AoCP occupying bookshelves for no reason other than to impress visitors.

Re:Many own, few read

[Mark_MF-WN]

I've got both the first and second edition of Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest. It's a great text.

Re:Many own, few read

[fm6]

I seem to recall reading that TAOCP was originally intended as a single volume. The project grew, because computer science grew as fast as Knuth could write. In the late 70s, Knuth joked that people should please stop doing any research, so he could finish the series!

I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.

It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Knuth isn't God. His books aren't the Bible. He's just a computer science professor who wrote some books on the topic of algorithms.

Yes. And Einsteins wasn't God either. His books aren't the Bible. He was just a theoretical physics professor who wrote some books on the topic of relativity. Your point is?

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Using MIX/MMIX is brilliant.

First, it stops copy-and-pasters. You have to actually read the books to gain knowledge.

Second, it shows the algorithms on a low level. Very good.

Third, as he's said, he doesn't have to update his book when the "language of the decade" changes.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is to stop worshipping the man and reading into the text things that aren't there.

Of course you were reading the whole thread, weren't you?

Re:Many own, few read

[gabbarbhai]

And for the rest, its more of a convenience thing. The way it works is, you look in CLR (Cormen, Lieserson, Rivest). If you find useful leads from there, you go follow them, or go to google or citeseer or something.

After a while, you get a little more curious (or a bit stuck with counting things down to the last epsilon), so you go look at Knuth. Finally, if nothing else works, you sit down and prove it.

Personally, Knuth, Graham & Patashnik, and Hopcroft & Ullman have bailed me out more often than AoCP

Re:Many own, few read

[Alomex]

Knuth is stubborn. That is his best and his worst attribute. He should have given up on MIX and on writing volume 4 on his own a long time ago. On the other hand if he weren't that stubborn, he would have never produced the first two volumes or the TeX formatting engine.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is to stop worshipping the man and reading into the text things that aren't there.

Such as? FYI Knuth have written his own exegesis of the Bible so there is no point in confusing his other books with it, isn't it?

Of course you were reading the whole thread, weren't you?

Yes I was, with -1 threshold. It was an exceptionally painful experience thanks to uninformed and infantile trolls such as yours.

Re:Many own, few read

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Isn't that because he got frustrated with the state of typography in his books, so did the proper hacker thing and spent a decade or so writing TeX?

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

A pseudo machine is actually a very good idea. It lets you present the ideas that you want to present in a fashion that is clear-cut and precise, without relying upon a given platform being available however many years down the track.

Case in point: the first volume of TAOCP was published in the late 1960s. How many systems that were available in the 1960s are still available? None. Even IBM's mainframes have undergone architectural changes between then and now, although they do (or at least should; I don't follow that area closely) maintain backwards compatibility.

With MIX (and now MMIX), though, this isn't an issue. You can take the code from the old volumes and run it on an appropriate emulator without any problems whatsoever.

The goal of TAOCP is to educate. Not to train. The former teaches you to use your brain and apply the concepts to whatever platform you are using. The latter teaches you how to do things on one platform; move you to something different, and you're hosed.

Re:Many own, few read

[CEHT]

Reading all volumes is one thing. Try reading them and finish all the exercises is another.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly. We don't mod heretics down. We burn them.

Re:Many own, few read

[EvanED]

I've got second edition of that book. (They added a fourth author, Stein, so I assume it's the same book.) Someone I know calls it the book of death 'cause it's big enough to kill someone with...

Re:Many own, few read

[multiplexo]

Hah! I got my volumes for free out of the damaged returns bin when I worked for Amazon. I mock you! I mock you all!

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf?

I am proud to say I bought them to learn machine language for my computer. But for some reason the instructions never worked on my machine!

Re:Many own, few read

[fm6]

First, it stops copy-and-pasters. You have to actually read the books to gain knowledge.

How does it stop c&p? Nobody studies Knuth without a MIX or MMIX emulator at hand.

Besides, if you're stupid enough to study CS without actually reading the code, you have no hope of even BSing your way through a course.

Second, it shows the algorithms on a low level. Very good.

Good that you spend all your effort twidling bits, instead of understanding the algorithm?

Third, as he's said, he doesn't have to update his book when the "language of the decade" changes.

So instead he has to update it for the machine architecture of the decade.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, heretic! We burn them down all right!

Re:Many own, few read

[thogard]

The one exercise reducing a NP problem to a P problem has me stumped and I can't quite figure it out. Other than that, I've got most of them.

Re:Many own, few read

[thogard]

One of the tricks of MIX was that it could be a binary computer or a decimal computer. You never knew which it was at any one time so it challenged some assumptions. Too bad the MMIX is a binary beast.

Re:Many own, few read

[danny]

After you finish all the exercises, don't forget to collect your Turing Prize (and maybe a Fields Medal as well), plus whatever collection of doctorates you want!

Danny.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Einsteins was wrong about more things than Knuth is.

Re:Many own, few read

[Shishberg]

Mod parent up (well, already on 4, but do it anyway). On an average random wander around my workplace, I can spot half a dozen sets of Knuth, mostly the cream-coloured hardcover ones in the navy blue box, in absolute pristine condition. Beginning with the set on my own desk.

Re:Many own, few read

[rreyelts]

CLR is a very good, thorough, book. (The book weighs about 100 lbs). For example, I've been working with a lot of graph theory lately, and CLR had some good information about relaxed heaps, fibonacci heaps, and even pointers to Ahuja's "Faster algorithms for the shortest path problem."

Re:Many own, few read

[corporate zombie]

I've heard they are the bible... long, boring, and impossible to read. :)

Having said that I have them all and I have made a valid attempt to get through them on 4 occasions. I haven't succeeded but I've learned more each time.

-CZ

Re:Many own, few read

[MourningBlade]

So instead he has to update it for the machine architecture of the decade.

• MIX: ~1964.
• MMIX: 1999.

I think he's doing a bit better than "decade."

As he says, part of the reason for MMIX is that many of the concepts needed for a good machine of this type had not been discovered when MIX was around. Now that things are to a state where they can be well-expressed, he's using a new model. Well, that and we tend to use floating point and ASCII these days.

Re:Many own, few read

[sixoseven]

My Knuth is right between my Hawking and my Wolfram.

Re:Many own, few read

[tim256]

I tried reading volumns one and two when I was a CS graduate student, before I dropped out. I found them very difficult to understand by my simple mind. Knuth is a very brillent, and I suggest you don't even try to read his publications unless you have a strong background in mathematics and computer science and lots of time.

Re:Many own, few read

[fm6]

There was a version in between called MIXMaster.

Your other comments rest on the assumption that you can only talk about algorithms by writing code in an actual executable language. But lots of CS books don't do that. They rely on pseudo-code, or they compare implementations in various high- and low-level languages. Even TAOCP is written so you can skip over the MIX parts.

Besides, if the code examples are obsolete in 10 years, so what? Most textbooks require major revision after that long. (Not to be confused with the pseudo-revisions done every year so that new textbooks don't have to compete with used ones.) And that's in standard disciplines that change relatively slowly. Nothing changes as quickly as CS!

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Knuth had what seemed like a good idea 40 years ago and can't let it go. (Actually, two of them; the other was that he could write a single comprehensive CS textbook.) That inability to see the flaws in a pet idea seems to be all too common among computer people.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

How does it stop c&p? Nobody studies Knuth without a MIX or MMIX emulator at hand.

It stops from copying into production code. This happens all too often with other coding examples. Microsoft recently had to upgrade their MSDN library because of this.

Good that you spend all your effort twidling bits, instead of understanding the algorithm?

I guess you're against learning what those little symbols in math mean, huh? As long as you understand that 2 plus 2 equeals 4, that's good enough, right? Learning what is actually going on is important.

So instead he has to update it for the machine architecture of the decade.

He updates it once (twice if you include MixMaster, which isn't worth mentioning since books using MixMaster weren't released) and you somehow interpret that to mean "every decade".

Re:Many own, few read

[MourningBlade]

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Knuth had what seemed like a good idea 40 years ago and can't let it go. (Actually, two of them; the other was that he could write a single comprehensive CS textbook.)

If his idea is to write a comprehensive CS textbook, then that probably is a mistake. Whatever comes out of the process certainly is interesting, however.

Your other comments rest on the assumption that you can only talk about algorithms by writing code in an actual executable language. But lots of CS books don't do that. They rely on pseudo-code, or they compare implementations in various high- and low-level languages. Even TAOCP is written so you can skip over the MIX parts.

Yes, you can skip over the MIX parts, but the point is that he is providing easily emulate-able code that precisely defines what he means. A working implementation of his concept that you can see and work with. Psuedocode cannot do this, and the various high level languages do turn into "language of the decade" competitions.

Further, as he states, he is demonstrating what it is that these high level languages are doing at the most basic level on a von-Neumann-variety machine. This is important in many cases, as the high level languages "mask"[1] this process.

[1] - scare quotes are because this masking has a purpose: elision, different way of looking at things, etc. But it is masking nonetheless when you're trying to say "what is it that this fundamentally does?"

Incidentally, you can also skip over the proof sections of TAOCP. That doesn't mean they're not a necessary part of the book.

Re:Many own, few read

[gwappo]

I have knuth 1-2-3, the only reason I found for needing "Introduction to Algorithms" is the description contained there-in for red-black trees (which is painfully missing in knuth).

Re:Many own, few read

[coaxial]

How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf? For my money, Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest's "Introduction to Algorithms" is preferred for almost all related material you might want to investigate.

The Big White Book of Algorithms is a fine book. It is much more accessable than Knuth (Examples in assembly instead of pseudocode? Please! At that point Knuth is just telling his reader "I'm smarter than you." Yeah, no shit Mr. Theory of Computing. That's why I'm reading your book instead of writing my own.), but for a more theoretical understanding you need Knuth. The best bet is to learn from the Big White Book, but grok from Knuth.

Re:Many own, few read

[artakka]

I had a very similar experience. I finally managed to find all three volumes in a small bookstore in Latvia where we were spending our honeymoon. I spend the rest of the honeymoon reading volume 1.

This was in 1985 and I am still married to the same person.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

S/he must be a saint!

Re:Many own, few read

[Slamtilt]

Nobody studies Knuth without a MIX or MMIX emulator at hand.

I thought you were supposed to write your own emulator. After all, he does give instructions on page 100 or thereabouts.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

as well as send your resumè to bill gates for a promised favourable consideration

Re:Many own, few read

[gowen]

Second, it shows the algorithms on a low level. Very good.

No. Very bad. This just means that the algorithm and the implementation get confused in the readers head. When learning algorithms, the algorithm should be be written in as high a level language as possible, preferably natural language of the student.

Which one of these better explains the bubble sort algorithm:

i) start with the first item on the list
ii) if their places of that item and the next should be exchanged, exchange them
iii) move down the list one place
iv) repeat from (ii)
v) when you reach the bottom of the list, start again from the top, but ignore the bottom element

for (i=0; i<n-1; i++) {
for (j=0; j<n-1-i; j++)
if (a[j+1] < a[j]) { /* compare the two neighbors */
tmp = a[j]; /* swap a[j] and a[j+1] */
a[j] = a[j+1];
a[j+1] = tmp;
}
}

Re:Many own, few read

[jschrod]

Knuth, who is the most humble person that I ever met, doesn't consider himself God either. He doesn't even consider TACP as his big contribution to CS.

According to him, attributed grammars are his big discovery. And since I still see PhD's spawned by his original article, he may be right in that. But it may also be his contributions to early programming languages, or other papers. Hell, he authored literally hundreds of papers (himself, btw; he's not the person to put his name on papers where he wasn't involved in writing.) His scientific account is not centered on TACP, but on other research. You're repeating folklore here.

Of course, as you can read, I'm biased; having had the honor to work with him.

Re:Many own, few read

[orasio]

Well, he is the equivalent to god, for me, if that's worth anything.

Re:Many own, few read

[Saint Nobody]

i found a solution, but it won't fit in this comment.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

For my money, Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest's "Introduction to Algorithms" is preferred for almost all related material you might want to investigate.

Heh...that's sitting on my desk right now!

Re:Many own, few read

[Zeinfeld]

I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!)

I first met Knuth before I started my doctorate, that was almost twenty years ago. Volume 4 was already notoriously overdue at the time.

I don't think that Knuth's objective is suited to a book any more. The most appropriate form for an encyclopeadia would be a peer moderated Wiki. But that is not Knuth's point the most appropriate medium for describing algorithms is not assembler.

I think that the role of books in the field has to be different now. We do not need exhaustive catalogues of 'stuff'. What we need is the best, most relevant 'stuff'.

Take parsing for example. All students are still taught yacc and bottom up parsing as if it was the greatest thing. In fact it does not work for natural languages and it is too flexible for computer languages.

LISP does not have an LR(1) parser, it has a FSR with a minor extension to balance brackets. XML does not have an LR(1) parser either. In fact there is not much difference between XML and LISP when you look at parser design, the only differences are that the brackets get pointy and there is a strange need to repeat the first item of the list at the end...

What we really need is a book that shows students how they can apply the theory to actually do really useful stuff. The yacc approach teaches them to stay down at the level of the weeds, it does not teach building larger scale abstractions.

Re:Many own, few read

[crawling_chaos]

If his idea is to write a comprehensive CS textbook, then that probably is a mistake.

And what a magnificient mistake it has turned out to be! By just trying to do it, he has contributed more to the discipline than many of the "critics" on Slashdot.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Which one of these better explains the bubble sort algorithm:

The code, since that actually works. Your step v is inaccurate.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, if the code examples are obsolete in 10 years, so what? Most textbooks require major revision after that long. (Not to be confused with the pseudo-revisions done every year so that new textbooks don't have to compete with used ones.) And that's in standard disciplines that change relatively slowly. Nothing changes as quickly as CS!

Damn right. I can't believe he still talks about balanced trees the way they used them in the 60s. I mean, 90s-style balanced trees are so completely different!

Nope, the CS Knuth writes about is applied maths, and - here's a bit of news for you - fundamental maths does not actually change very frequently? If you want to sort some data, chances are you use a quicksort or a heapsort. Those are the exact same algorithms we've been using to sort data for decades now. They aren't changing, they aren't obsolete, they aren't going anywhere.

Re:Many own, few read

[ChrisMaple]

Although I have a lot of respect for Knuth, I have to agree with your point. Knuth covers a lot of material thoroughly and well, but if I want to learn something absolutely new to me, I find I'm better off reading another book that covers the same subject. For me, Knuth is not easy to learn from.

Re:Many own, few read

[CTalkobt]

>> The one exercise reducing a NP problem to a P problem has me stumped and I can't quite figure it out. Other than that, I've got most of them.

I solved it but the space he provided in the margines was too small for me to write it in...

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he has given up on MIX. MMIX is all the rage now.

Re:Many own, few read

[fm6]

The yacc approach teaches them to stay down at the level of the weeds, it does not teach building larger scale abstractions.

Which is still a higher level than Knuth will go when he gets to this subject. Presumably he intends to write his parsers in MMIX!

Re:Many own, few read

[Fenris Ulf]

I've found a solution to P=NP, but the lameness filter won't allow me to post it.

Re:Many own, few read

[fm6]

When learning algorithms, the algorithm should be be written in as high a level language as possible, preferably natural language of the student.

Which is actually what Knuth does. But then he goes on to "implement" the algorithm on his pseudo-machine.

This approach was much easier to justify when he came up with it back in the 60s. Except for Fortran (obviously not suitable for a CS text) or Lisp (a kind of language I can't picture Knuth using), there was simply no high-level language most people had access to. And giving code examples in a particular machine language would have made forced the students to make assumption that might not apply for a lot of machines. Even byte-oriented addressing was not universally accepted!

But that's a long time ago. I guess what disturbs me about this project is not so much the specific weirdnesses -- the "generic" pseudo machine, and the idea of writing a comprehensive text for such a huge subject. It's that Knuth assigned himself some very specific goals 40 years ago, and refuses to acknowledge all the changes that made these goals obsolete.

Re:Many own, few read

[chanceH]

Which one of these better explains the bubble sort algorithm:


That'd be the code. I got bored of your text description about half way through and couldn't even finish it.

Re:Many own, few read

[bobbyjack]

"and there is a strange need to repeat the first item of the list at the end..."

My instinct is that this behaviour removes the need to handle a special-case whilst parsing: generally considered to be a good thing (TM) (well, at least by those who favour comprehension over storage space/efficiency such as ... XML 'users').

Just as the LISP grammar requires a closing parenthesis for 'the first element', IIRC.

P.S. Why doesn't slash support the use of <q> tags?

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trolling, trying to be critical, or that other idiot, but you do realise how ironic your last paragraph seems, don't you? ;-)

(There follows at least one AC comment about the definition of irony; I just can't think of a more approriate term at the moment, OK? ;-)

Re:Many own, few read

[ivan256]

Read them all cover to cover? No... But I frequently pull one off the shelf to refresh my memory about a particular algorithm, or to see if there's a better one I haven't thought of to solve a problem I'm working on...

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf?

Fewer than the number of people who have CS degrees but don't know jack shit about CS.

Re:Many own, few read

[cecom]

So, you were lucky in more than one way :-) Did you eventually read all three of the volumes (and as other people have said, with exercises) ?

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

"Pick a topic that Knuth and CLR both cover, and for 25% of your questions both will cover, for another 50% Knuth will but not CLR, and for the remainder neither."

What? Read this carefully, correct either the three mistakes or the fundamental premise, and try again. ;)

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

Your natural language description is easy to understand, but imprecise.

Your code description is not so easy (but also not so hard) to understand, but precise.

It's the same reason that exposition in mathematics uses both words and symbols.

Re:Many own, few read

[David Gould]

tmp = a[j]; /* swap a[j] and a[j+1] */
a[j] = a[j+1];
a[j+1] = tmp;

Meh. A real programmer would have written:

a[j] ^= a[j+1];
a[j+1] ^= a[j];
a[j] ^= a[j+1];


But seriously, the idea of using a machine-level language isn't to get caught up in "bit-twiddling" at the expense of high-level understanding. It's to be sure to show the steps more explicitly (and thus more clearly). Using "a language so simple even a computer can understand it" ensures that it's clear exactly what every step is actually doing, which, especially for new students, helps with the complexity-analysis part. Of course you also explain the "big picture" of the algorithm at the natural language level, and probably also at the pseudo-code level.

To answer your question, which version in your example better explains how BubbleSort works? The English version, of course. (Well, it would if it were correct, but others have already picked those nits.) But which one makes it easier for a first-year student to see that the runtime is n^2/2 compare-and-maybe-swap operations (and from there to understand what it means to say that it's O(n^2))? Methinks it's the C version.

Re:Many own, few read

[ahdeoz]

The only reason he invented MIX is because he started it before C had become popular. Once you learn pointers and gotos, you can directly access memory, and once you understand how to write a loop or conditional with jumps, then there's no reason to go any lower.

Re:Many own, few read

[rsheridan6]

MIX is at least as outdated as Algol. If you know Java/C/just about any language you can make a pretty good guess about what a snippet of Algol is supposed to do, but MIX is just plain weird. And he didn't update it (at least not in any published version yet released) so he's not saving himself any work by using an obsolete, archaic, machine language instead of an obsolete, archaic, high-level language. There's nothing any more timeless about self-modifying assembler that works with decimal numbers than there is about Algol W.

I think the Cormen Rivest Leiserson book uses a better approach - they use a generic made-up high-level language that anyone who knows any real language could probably understand.

OTOH, it's kind of interesting to see how programmers worked in 1965. And it'll make you glad it's not 1965.

Re:Many own, few read

[rsheridan6]

I think he's doing a bit better than "decade."

Only because he didn't bother to update an obsolete language for a 20-30 years, which he could have just as easily not bothered to do with a higher level language.

Re:Many own, few read

[Anonymous Coward]

No mistake. They might both cover a topic but not all of it if the topic is big enough.

Re:Many own, few read

[angel'o'sphere]

Come on guy, everybody sees that this i not C but Java!

And therefor your real programmer example makes no sense alltogether! Because 6 indexed array accesses are far more expensive than using only 3 and a temp variabl. In C you could (would) even use a register.

Ok, just kidding :D

Anyway, regardless of the time used inside of the loop, of course the complexity still is O(n ^2).

What I find funny, the original poster seems the be convicned that the C/Java version is easier to understand, otherwise I can't explain my self why his english (pseudo code) version is so buggy (incomprehensive).

angel'o'sphere

Still Waiting

[Detritus]

When I bought Volume 3, about 20 years ago, it included a postcard that the buyer could mail to the publisher, to be added to a mailing list for notification when Volume 4 was published. I sent in the postcard.

I'm still waiting.

Re:Still Waiting

[Surazal]

You should really let us know if the notification comes when the book is released. I wanna see how good they keep their customer records. ;^)

Re:Still Waiting

[Animats]

In 1967, you could order and prepay for all six volumes, to be delivered as published. At a good price, too. I wonder how many people are still waiting.

Re:Still Waiting

[CrazyTalk]

Condidering the "time value of money", those books cost those people a fortune. And I thought Lucas was bad making us wait so many years between the first and second Star Wars trilogys - he's got nothing on this guy!

Re:Still Waiting

[sinserve]

Google for a guy called Jack Crenshaw; He graduated from school, married, had a family, divorced, went through rehab, recoverd, started a career as a physicist, etc. All while writing his "Let's write a compiler" series of tutorials. Now that is HARDCORE procastenation :-)

"But when will it be published?"

[RedWizzard]

But when will it be published? Bookpool does not hazard a guess."

Um, they said 2007. So what, do story submittors not bother to RTFA either these days?

Re:"But when will it be published?"

[NitsujTPU]

Bookpool says July 2005 (estimated).

Re:"But when will it be published?"

[RedWizzard]

Bookpool says July 2005 (estimated).

For fascicle 3, yes. For all of volume 3, "look for it at Bookpool in the year 2007".

Re:"But when will it be published?"

[NitsujTPU]

Whoops.

4 you mean.

Re:"But when will it be published?"

[RedWizzard]

Yep, vol 4 I mean. I did the preview and everything.

killfile

[Anonymous Coward]

I love bookpool but this mailing was premature and a waste of my time. Unfortunately since they've now been /.ed I can't get to their site to unsubscribe ;)

did anybody else think of the Monty Python skit

[Anonymous Coward]

"Theory of the Brontosaurus"?

You can already buy some of it

[SJasperson]

Check the left column of http://www.bookpool.com/.x/SSSSSS_C473S597521D0502 011740/ct/163. You can buy parts of Vol. 1 (revised) and 4 already, in addition to the one part that's ready for free download. They also say they expect to be able to sell you the entire volume 4 in 2007. And I'll bet Knuth doesn't slip nearly as bad as Longhorn.

Re:You can already buy some of it

[antispam_ben]

And I'll bet Knuth doesn't slip nearly as bad as Longhorn.

Whichever's out first, I bet Knuth is a lot more stable.

Re:You can already buy some of it

[Anonymous Coward]

Longhorn could be delayed by 20 some years and it would still have slipped less than this volume. My CS professor last semester was constantly complaining about the fact that he's been waiting since he was a senior in high school for the next volume.

Version 4!

[Dancin_Santa]

Hopefully he finishes it before he finishes living.

All the best to the man, but seriously, dude, get on the ball. You don't have that many years left. If you can distill what's in your brain into book form, you will have done all of us a huge service.

Re:Version 4!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope he finishes both Volume 4 and Volume 5 before he finishes living. And then revise 1-3, and then volumes 6 and 7. They're great books. (And wow, what sappy music on GrooveSalad right now to go along with this post)

2007

[CEHT]

Knuth made a suggestion that he would have vol 4 published in 2007. I wouldn't doubt his estimation if he wrote down a deadline for himself, and everyone else.

Dear Knuth

[Letter]

Dear Knuth,

After Vol. 4 are you going to do some "prequels?" So 1-4 are actually, say, 3-6, and then the new Vols. 1 and 2 include new special effects capable only in LaTeX2e?

Letter

Re:Dear Knuth

[johnnyb]

I actually wrote my own book as sort of a prequel to TAOCP. TAOCP assumes that you already have experience with some sort of assembly language. My book doesn't assume anything:

My book teaches programming using assembly language on Linux

Re:Dear Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have used a simulator to teach Assembly, like MMIX or MIPS (plenty of MIPS simulators abound). Using Linux and x86 was a mistake.

Re:Dear Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail to mention you can download your book for free: http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AsmTools/Gas/Programming GroundUp.pdf

Re:Dear Knuth

[johnnyb]

If you're going to post the free URL, you should at least post the official one:

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

Re:Dear Knuth

[Zaak]

You should have used a simulator to teach Assembly, like MMIX or MIPS (plenty of MIPS simulators abound). Using Linux and x86 was a mistake.

MIPS? Ew. Branch delay slots are evil. (But at least it doesn't have those silly register windows like SPARC.)

Teach something like ARM instead. Very nice, very cool. Shifted immediates, predicated instructions, thumb code. And ARMs are as common as MIPSs.

TTFN

Re:Dear Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, I thought Knuth already did that with _Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science_.

Re:Dear Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry. I googled for "programming from the ground up filetype:pdf" and that was the first one I found.

I DO read them!

[nomadic]

How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf?

That's absolute nonsense. I often will take one of his volumes off the bookshelf, put La Boheme on the stereo (the Pappano recording, of course) , pour myself a glass of Le Montrachet '78, and peruse Prof. Bluth's delightful words. You shouldn't be bitter just because you're too uncouth to understand them.

Re:I DO read them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this suppose to be funny?

Re:I DO read them!

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose it is.

Re:I DO read them!

[Anonymous Coward]

supposed!
supposed!
supposed!

Re:I DO read them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Request to moderators: Mod down anyone who says "I know I'll be modded down for this."

What if they say it in their signature? Is there a "-1 as requested by poster"?

Re:I DO read them!

[identity0]

Don't forget to run all example code with the '79 MIX machine - it just wouldn't do to use something as lowbrow as (gasp) an emulator to run Dr. Knuth's heavenly code. It has to be a '79, of course - I swear, they stopped making real computers after '79. They just don't make 'em like they used to.

And afterwards, a relaxing steam bath powered by the Pentium-4 watercooling kit, and a organic avocado facial to let the pure ephemeral brilliance of Dr. Knuth's equasions sink in.

Re:I DO read them!

[kurosawdust]

God. How....Proustian. *swirls brandy*

Re:I DO read them!

[seanellis]

His description of the elegance of balanced-ternary as a compact method of representing numbers is a joy to read.

But I personally find MIX assembly language virtually impenetrable. The instruction mnemonics seem to be designed to impede understanding, not assist it, and the damn thing doesn't even have a "return from subroutine" instruction - you have to self-modify a jump! Recursive algorithms become instantly nasty.

I am glad he's changing this to a more modern, RISC-like architecture, which is likely to be around for a while.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[bkazez]

"So in other words, Knuth produced a product that gives you results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word, while forcing you to learn a massive amount of practically useless contorted macro language."

I tend to agree with most of the remarks about the quality of TeX's output, but I strongly disagree with the notion that TeX output looks worse than Microsoft Word. Although the font will be normal, although the linespacing will be more standard (even though the pica of extra spacing that's mentioned in this article doesn't exist in TeX), all one has to do is whip out Microsoft Equation Editor and see how it compares to TeX's equations. There's absolutely no comparison -- TeX wins easily.

Re:Is it just me?

[Dancin_Santa]

does slashdot look like shit?

You must be new here.

No, I'm New Here

[New Here]

No, I'm New Here

Re:No, I'm New Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, your karma must be shit.

review of volumes 1 to 3

[danny]

You might be interested in my review of volumes 1 to 3.

I'm off to ask Addison-Wesley for a review copy of volume 4!

Danny.

Re:review of volumes 1 to 3

[cecom]

Wow! A review of the bible ! :-)

Re:review of volumes 1 to 3

[Bitmanhome]

I can't be bothered to read it. Is there a review of your reviews?

Question

[Spy der Mann]

Is this the same Knuth that wrote along with Morris and Pratt the famous string matching algorithm?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. You mean there's another Knuth?

Re:Question

[Spy der Mann]

Yes. You mean there's another Knuth?

Well, there's been cases of repeated last names in science... I just never thought that a person both prominent and low-profile (who in here has studied information theory and text searching algorithms?) would appear on a popular site such as /.

I've been studied algorithms for years, and this close encounter...

I'M NOT WORTHY! _o_

I'M NOT WORTHY! \o/

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

(who in here has studied information theory and text searching algorithms?) *raises hand* Anyhoo. My "You mean there's another Knuth?" was suppose to be a light, minorly comical remark. Ignore it.

Re:Question

[rsidd]

Well, there's been cases of repeated last names in science... I just never thought that a person both prominent and low-profile (who in here has studied information theory and text searching algorithms?) would appear on a popular site such as /.

Well, here's another reason he'd appear on Slashdot: he wrote TeX, which is even today the best free typesetting system. And it beats every commercial typesetting system for typesetting mathematics, which Microsoft, Adobe and others don't have a clue about after 20 years of research (indeed, most scientific publishers use TeX/LaTeX). You'll find it on your linux box: among other things, GNU TeXinfo uses it for printable manuals.

And yes, that's still the same Knuth -- he wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the publishers' typesetting of TAOCP.

Re:Question

[dozer]

Yes, it's the same Knuth. But Boyer-Moore is almost always a better algorithm to use.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea about Adobe's end-user software for typesetting, but the postscript and PDF formats are just as sophisticated as TeX (after all, most TeX documents end up being converted into PS or PDF before they are printed/published on the web/whatever). LaTeX has the advantage that it is vastly easier to write than postscript, but I wouldn't dismiss Adobe's work.

I also rather like Mathematica's typesetting abilities.

However, I agree that TeX is a magnificent piece of software.

Re:Question

[Spy der Mann]

Actually... if you want to search multiple substrings in one HUGE string, it's much faster to make a suffix tree. Recommended by genetists :)

Re:Question

[sigmoid_balance]

Yes, he's the same guy. Maybe his only realy valuable contribution to CS. IMO his books are overrated. When I when to ACM regionals everyone had "Introduction to Algorithms" on their tables. Also ItA is in to top 3 quoted books in CS.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe his only realy valuable contribution to CS

Well I am not sure that's entirely true. He ushered in the 'field' of analysis of algorithms and suggested the use of the O-notation (of course he didn't 'invent' the notation). Also, I believe a lot of the parsing theory used in compilers actually stems from Knuth's early work. His contribution to theoretical CS is rather sizeable in my opinion (which is certainly biased being a student in his Dept.) and you should be able to discover that for yourself too if you have enough enthusiasm to probe into Theory.
ItA is popular because its a very decent book which is a lot more accessible to a larger population. TAOCP is a MUCH tougher read (but at the same time an order of magnitude more comprehensive).

Re:Question

[Fenris Ulf]

Don't forget Rabin-Karp, though that requires a minimum string length.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[convolvatron]

ok. i'll agree with you about the art of computer programming. the agenda is far greater than the content, although there is some stuff of utility in there.

however, tex, as awful of a language as it is, manages to produce output that has the symmetry and balance of (almost) a typesetter. comparing it to msword can only be a troll.

i've had as many problems as everyone else dealing with floats and other garbage, but tex looks nice. admit it.

(uncommented c code?)

Algorithmic Sith Lord

[Anonymous Coward]

Secrets out. The book are so slow because of Don's Star Wars commitments:

• Sith Lord
• Maths Guy

• Uncanny!

Re:Algorithmic Sith Lord

[Elvis77]

Sorry Dude, I think its because of his other hobby, He says, "During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides."

I'd like to tell you about this one and I'm glad slow people have somewhere for their kids to go and play.

They sure have funny signs in Ohio

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that was hilarious. I don't give a shit about Knuth, but your troll was AWESOME!

Mods, mark this one +5, Funny/Troll!

The Childe Knuth

[iJames]

Man. At this rate, he's never going to get to the Dark Tower.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[jjoyce]

if he spent most of the time like a typical "hacker", drinking Mountain Dew and masturbating

Hey now, that was a pretty low blow. Many of us hate Mountain Dew.

actually, my review of the Bible is here

[danny]

*grin*

Actually, my review of the Bible (well, one edition of it, anyway) is here.

Danny.

mods on crack?

[Anonymous Coward]

+2 insightful? what about -1 obvious?

Sedgewick does it for me

[melted]

Algorithms in C, volumes 1 through 5. Absolutely the best comp sci book out there. One page of Knuth makes me sleepy. Sedgewick reads like a good detective story - you can't put it down.

Re:Sedgewick does it for me

[Anonymous Coward]

WORST BOOKS EVER! Go with Knuth. He actually explains things mathematically.

Re:Sedgewick does it for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Sedgewick reads like a good detective story - you can't put it down.

Was it the quicksort wot dun it?

Re:Sedgewick does it for me

[Fenris Ulf]

Absolutely. Sedgewick is usually my first choice when I need quick and practical information on a data structures or algorithmic problem.

So who is Art, anyway? How does Mad Magazine fit?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did read once that the "Art" in "The Art of Computer Programming" is actually another programmer. IIRC it was in one of Peter van der Linden's books.

The same story also claimed that Professor Knuth was also a contributor of some note to Mad Magazine.

If TeX is too hard....

[the_womble]

....and it is for me,

use Lyx, very good quality output - as printout, PDF or HTML and easier to use than MS Word.

Re:If TeX is too hard....

[klmth]

And if you're stuck on windows, you could always use something like TeXnicCenter. It's an IDE for LaTex. If you take some time to learn the program, it's no harder to use than Word. You can just jump in and start typing LaTex if you like.

Re:If TeX is too hard....

[tamills]

I like Lyx, but I just can't find enough templates. And I can't see how to create them myself (I am ignorant of TeX and LaTeX). I've used Lyx to produce a letter and the output was tremendous. But that is the only template I've found useful.

I've search high and low for new templates and there just doesn't seem to be a huge community for these things (or at least Google doesn't get it).

Breadth-first preferred [Re:Version 4!]

[j.leidner]

I have very high respect for who is perhaps the most persevering personality that I have ever heard of.

However I agree with you in that I'd prefer Dr Knuth to proceed with the completion of his book series in a breadth-first fashion rather than depth-first (i.e., dropping the habit to take a few years off to revise all existing volumes every couple of years). This would even able other people to assist him in refining the set and filling in the gaps; maybe he could even set up a wiki for the non-existing volumes to gather material in a more "open source" way.

But then who am I to tell the Aristotle of computer science what to do...

Re:Breadth-first preferred [Re:Version 4!]

[Anonymous Coward]

Aristotle never bothered to check his facts.

Unless women really do have fewer teeth than men. And unless weasels really do give birth through their mouths.

Re:Breadth-first preferred [Re:Version 4!]

[Anonymous Coward]

One excellent reason for Knuth to do a depth first traversal of known algorithms is to the beat the shit out of software patents. Who can patent anything when half the stuff is covered in a Knuth book?

Re:Breadth-first preferred [Re:Version 4!]

[Anonymous Coward]

> And unless weasels really do give birth through their mouths.

You're just jealous because you can't do it.

Wait a minute!

[PaulBu]

Knuth isn't God.

Correct, so far...

His books aren't the Bible.

Wrong!

Actually I think that I heard that his motivation for MetaFont (not TeX) was proper typesetting of the Bible, the link above might put you on a trail.

Paul B.

Re:Wait a minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

A book discussing the Bible != the Bible.

Re:Wait a minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

> > His books aren't the Bible.

> Wrong! [knauth.org]

Informative? Look closer: its a link to Knauth, not Knuth's website! Its a website of Knauth Family!!

Re:Wait a minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative? Look closer: its a link to Knauth, not Knuth's website! Its a website of Knauth Family!!

No kidding. Deanna Knauth is hot! And she draws pictures ala goatse!! I kid you not! How cool is that? Deanna, will you marry me?

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[dido]

Also (La)TeX has become de rigeur for publishing in scientific journals. Compare the submission guidelines for sending an article to any The Physical Review journals in any of the TeX variants they prefer to that of doing a submission with MS Word. The American Mathematical Society apparently won't even accept papers typeset in anything other than LaTeX.

For scientific publishing, LaTeX really is the way to go.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[bkazez]

Word definitely does look better for non-mathematical documents, but when it comes to math (and that's what TeX was designed for), I still assert that TeX wins. -- http://ben.kazez.com/

The fourth volume will be published...

[slavemowgli]

... posthumously.

Re:Additional information is online

[KarmaBlackballed]

Knuth is okay. But I prefer google. More pages.

There's a fun bit in

[multiplexo]

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross where one of the characters reveals that the reason why Knuth hasn't released volume 4 is that it contains a hack that allows you to solve non-deterministic polynomial (NP) problems in polynomial time. This is such a huge secret that the world's intelligence agencies, who already know how to do this, have an agreement with Professor Knuth where as long as he doesn't publish volume 4 they won't render him metabolically challenged (i.e, "dead".

The Atrocity Archives is a way cool book, I heartily recommend it to /. geeks. Stross used to work as a programmer/sysadmin so it's a lot of fun if you've ever worked in IT.

Re:There's a fun bit in

[Robert G. Werner]

So are we saying that Knuth is planning on becoming metabolically challenged in 2007 or do we think he's made other arrangements? Maybe he got in contact with a Frost Giant or something. Maybe the Iraqi group escaped "Mission Accomplished" and offered Knuth a better deal? So many ideas. Come on Charles, tell us what happens next.

Re:There's a fun bit in

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right. He would be more famous than Einstein if he did that, however.

The wrong volume 4 won!

[Flexagon]

For many years, I wondered which volume 4 would win the race; this one or Star Wars. Too bad the wrong one won!

Re:The wrong volume 4 won!

[Beolach]

Umm... Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was released in 1977...

Re:The wrong volume 4 won!

[Flexagon]

As you say, that was Episode 4. "Volume 4", at least in the race between Knuth and Lucas, was effectively Episode 1. But it's all lost if one has to explain the joke. :-)

Re:Additional information is online

[wdr1]

Without Knuth there would be no Google. 'nuff said.

Re:Is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it went a bit schitzo for a few minutes.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[adam31]

By my calculations, this method is approximately 2,522,880 times more efficient than Knuth's

Why are you getting so worked up about an improvement by only a constant factor?

Theoretically, the methods are equivalent... In fact, as the number of Knuth's books goes to infinity, the overhead of having to call the typesetters each time will overcome the one-time expense of writing the typesetting language.

Eh, mediocre at best.

[Grendel Drago]

Oh, come on. Adequacy has produced some good trolls (though I can't remember any from the top of my head), but this... is just sloppy.

like, for example, page numbering starting on a number other than 1

\pageno=10

I didn't know how to do that. I googled for it. No nine megabytes of C code involved. And a real troll would have seized on TeX being written in WEB, the Pascal-like "literate programming" language that Knuth designed himself. A real troll would have further complained that most hacking is really done using TeX's own macro system, which can be weird and baroque a lot of the time.

And how did "Knuth" become "Bluth" halfway through? If it's a joke about the Mormon animator, follow it through.

And dear god, man, there may be better ways of separating content and presentation---standards-compliant HTML with CSS, anyone?---but MS Word is not it. I've seen documents that have gone through many hands, serious works that involve difficult formatting... and it ain't pretty. Word is simply not a serious typesetting tool. Talk about InDesign or QuarkXPress if you want to go on about that.

LaTeX also allows the use of standard PostScript fonts with a quick

\usepackage{times}

in the preamble, but I kinda like the cm fonts myself.

Also, I'm not sure where the complaints about needing to edit incomprehensible jargon to correct typos came from. Text is represented as... plain old text. When is it any other way? Math is hard to read if it's badly written or you're not used to it, but it's no worse than it has to be, to my eyes.

Is it a sign of the incredible good design of TeX that the Adequacy people couldn't find very many real flaws to harp on? Or does Adequacy simply suck ass? I fear it to be the latter; I have plenty of nits to pick with TeX, but this reads like it was written by someone who heard of TeX once, and decided to write a rant about it. Frickin' weak.

--grendel drago

Re:Eh, mediocre at best.

[Dun Malg]

Is it a sign of the incredible good design of TeX that the Adequacy people couldn't find very many real flaws to harp on? Or does Adequacy simply suck ass? I fear it to be the latter

Don't know about the former, but the latter is definitely true. Adequacy.org was self-described as site about "Controversial opinions, passionately held". In reality, it was a annoying loudmouth site full of smug contrarians obsessed with their own superiority. Hard to tell whether the site operators actually believed this, or were doing it as a put on; but in 2002, after only 14 months, they apparently grew tired of it, "froze" it into a static site, and have just left it there for future trolls to mine.

Re:Eh, mediocre at best.

[ChTh]

\usepackage{times}

That's obsolete, use mathptmx instead. Read more in the documentation for PSNFSS.

Re:Eh, mediocre at best.

[Dahan]

And how did "Knuth" become "Bluth" halfway through? If it's a joke about the Mormon animator, follow it through.

Knuth, a talented animator in his spare time, clearly knew a thing or two about art, so quite why he chose to bring the word "art" into the title of a wholly non-artistic computer manual is beyond me.

Well I thought it was amusing :)

Re:Eh, mediocre at best.

[getarun_vr]

I daresay we have missed the point here. We are in fact missing the tongue-twister acronymn WYSIWYG (What-you-see-is-what-you-get). If you can resist the temptation of that instant gratification of seeing the final output as-you-type.

I would say that TeX is ideal for long documents like books or novels. Here consistency is the key. However for the vast majority of day to day office work, documents are often formatted and reformatted till the 'Aha!' feeling comes.

I must say that after using MS Word (and other word-pocessors) for a long time, it took me many iterations to produce a whitepaper in TeX. I'm sure this effort will be reduced to nothing when I'll make a similar paper, but I'm sure it would have deterred the first-timer. Yet, I know of many professors who would be so used to TeX that they would take screen-shots of PDF documents to present them on a ppt :)

You cannot always blame Word for being misused or for badly sructured Word documents. Its the same old case of any product that is easily accessible a large user base. I'm sure you can abuse TeX just as easily.

Re:Eh, mediocre at best.

[tootlemonde]

However for the vast majority of day to day office work, documents are often formatted and reformatted till the 'Aha!' feeling comes.

There was a time when a typewriter was adequate for day-to-day office work. Word processors solved the main problem of typewriters, which was the difficulty of making corrections and revisions. The first word processors used printers that were little more than high-speed typewriters.

Elaborate typography resulted from the invention of cheap laser printers. However, even then, typography was more of a by-product. The main advantage of laser printers was speed. The speed of the laser printer further augmented the main function of word processors by allowing even faster corrections and revisions.

Typography has added an extra level of corrections and revisions. I suspect that today more time is spent fiddling with the typograpy than the content of the document. The reasons is that in the distant past, typesetting lent authority to a document because it suggested that it was important enough to go to the enormous extra trouble and cost of having it typeset. The typeset appearance is now the minimum standard so that a document without a typeset appearance has almost as little appearance of authority as a handwritten version.

In terms of efficiency, the optimal use of a word processor would be with a monospaced font with bolding, italicizing and different font sizes kept to a minimum. Such documents could be formatted in a markup language like Tex or HTML almost as efficiently as in a WYSIWYG processor. The small loss of efficiency would be recovered by the extra flexibility of managing the document as text in version control and content management systems and by making it easier to re-publish it in different formats (e.g. pdf, Web pages).

Moreover, by using style sheets to mark up the document, a document formatter would automatically apply the enhanced typograpy, giving the required appearance of authority.

The missing ingredient is a standard for the appearance for day-to-day documents, which would allow for the definition of style sheets. The absence of such a standard in most corporations indicates that corporations probably don't really understand document management.

The absence of the standard also appeals to another human frailty: the desire to put your own typographical stamp on the appearance of a document even when you did not create the content.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[chthonicdaemon]

I have to say, as a LaTeX user for about three years, and having done my Masters and soon my PhD using LaTeX, that I cringe each time I am forced to use Word (or any word processor for that matter).

It is true that LaTeX has a steep learning curve, but I wouldn't call \section an unintuitive way of inserting a section heading. You say (La)TeX output is ugly? I assume you have never seen the excessive spacing Word frequenly add s between words (and sometimes even between letters!). I assume you have never had to wrestle a figure into place only to have it wrap around to the next page (if you used paragraph or character anchors) or stuck on a page it shouldn't be (if you used page anchors). Those figures cause ugly half-open pages. By the way -- if you hate the default font, just change it! Use Times New Roman (or even some sans-serif monstrosity, if you feel daring) and everything will look a bit more familiar.

I wouldn't advocate the use of (La)TeX for casual users who 'just want to type and select pretty fonts', but for anything more than a few pages, Word falls on its face.

Somebody has to say it.... Might as well be me...

[sconeu]

I hear it will be bundled with a copy of Longhorn and a copy of Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators, please, this is totally hilarious. ++funny

Spoiler

[HiggsBison]

Quicksort shoots first.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

Word can handle more than a few pages?

But seriously, in the past I've been forced to write 40 and 50 page manuscripts (dense with equations) in Word. I recall spending more time debugging the bloody equation numbering than actually writing the prose.

MSW for technical text? Just say no.

Apples to oranges.

[Grendel Drago]

Comparing TeX to PS or PDF doesn't really make sense. PostScript and PDF are output languages, while TeX is a typesetting program. It's like comparing the merits of Photoshop versus JPEG.

I don't think anyone really writes PS directly, unless they're l33t hackers. (There is that tiny snowflake program that prints a different snowflake every time. That's pretty darn nifty.

But little to do with typesetting. You'd want to compare TeX to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, I suppose. Comparing it to MS Word is a frickin' joke.

--grendel drago

Re:Apples to oranges.

[Anonymous Coward]

Very good comment, and just to add, Adobe InDesign does do multiline layout, just like TeX. And it supports more types of fonts, variant glyphs, etc.

Re:Apples to oranges.

[colinrichardday]

Actually, using psplot in PStricks requires one to enter a little raw PostScript. If you want to draw a graph of y=3sin(2x) from x=0 to x=360, you have

\psplot{0}{360}{x 2 mul sin 3 mul}.

Where the last braced expression is in PostScript. Thank goodness I know RPN

Re:Apples to oranges.

[pjt33]

I don't think anyone really writes PS directly, unless they're l33t hackers.

I think that's the first time I've ever been called a l33t hacker. My current personal project has one output option where it processes a PS file I hand-wrote and replaces certain special comments with the values to display.

In addition, Sabin (of Doo-Sabin fame) lectures a graphics course in which he starts with PS so that people can use it to do the exercises. (His lecture notes were my first PS tutorial).

Re:Apples to oranges.

[HuguesT]

You really want to compare Word and (La)TeX, they are both document preparation systems that provide you with outlines, tables, figures, indexes, tables of content, equations and general typesetting facilities (styles, fonts, etc).

MS-Word is the archetypal "WYSIWYG" typesetting system, with all of its seemingly low-barrier-of-entry appeal. It is completely state of the art. The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.

People have written whole books in Word and even swear by its facilities (e.g. indexing, outline view, etc)

In contrast TeX is more of a "what you mean is what you get" system. It enforces the rules of the Chicago Book of Style for you in a relatively straighforward manner. You enter the data structure of the document, it produces something up to publishing standards immediately. It is incredibly productive but not of obvious usage to anyone. In TeX to produce a document you have to find an editor, a command line and invoke the TeX compiler (yes I do know about things like LyX, TeXShop and the like, they are but a crutch to the TeX afficionado, although they might lower the barrier of entry somewhat).

In Word you just type away. You *will* make stylistic mistakes that TeX would not allow you to get away with, but it does look easier at first glance, and even long-time TeX users have to fight with the system to sometime get the result they would like to see (like "put that damn figure on *this* page, not the other page, dammit!") although what TeX does is usually the correct,proper way.

No prize for deciding which is the eventual winner however, except in the category of "ease of use for single-page, no frills documents", and even then...

TeX is not meant for desktop publishing though. You would not be able to put together a glossy magazine in TeX without considerable efforts, and so doesn't really compare with Quark or Indesign.

For DTP the free alternative is Scribus.

Re:Apples to oranges.

[chialea]

>The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.

I've personally never seen a good wysiwyg equation editor. I've used several, and the pain and suffering I went through made me swear off everything but LaTeX. I personally don't see how you could use as many symbols as LaTeX gives you access to in a quick way, using a GUI. On top of that, MS Office has implementation problems. If I wanted my mathematical symbols to turn into freaking FLOWERS and LEAVES and STARS, I would have put them in that way.

(And by the way, I use TexShop. It's a little slower than using a makefile for final production, but you can script it if you really care. Usually I need to run BibTex once a week, at most, so it's not an issue.)

Lea

Re:Apples to oranges.

[rxmd]

The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.

I've personally never seen a good wysiwyg equation editor.

LyX's is pretty decent, due to the work by André Pönitz. However, as with everything LyX, it's pretty LaTeX-centric. You can use LaTeX shortcuts, generate LaTeX output, and you can even generate an inline LaTeX preview for your equations. I regularly use LyX for generating equations and tables; I paste them into my LaTeX source afterwards.

Re:Apples to oranges.

[cecom]

I've personally never seen a good wysiwyg equation editor.

Personally, I would go further than that. I've never seen a good WYSIWYG text editor. For anything bigger than a couple of pages, it becomes impossible for me to achieve consistent visual style with MS Word. I can never get the table of contens working (why does it need a special command in order to update itself? - this is absurd!).

I dare say, writing directly in HTML is much easier in many cases (and a lot more portable :-).

Re:Apples to oranges.

[chialea]

>I dare say, writing directly in HTML is much easier in many cases (and a lot more portable :-).

I believe you can even take tex and convert it over to HTML, if you wanted. Anything (basically, "really weird symbols or equations") that can't be rendered reasonably in html will be made into images. Images aren't ideal, but seem to be the best option, under the circumstances. You could thus argue that writing in LaTeX is both more portable and easier than writing in HTML for many things.

Lea

Re:Apples to oranges.

[rssrss]

People have written whole books in Word and even swear by its facilities (e.g. indexing, outline view, etc)

Most of us swear at Word's facilities.

Re:Apples to oranges.

[6031769]

In TeX to produce a document you have to find an editor, a command line and invoke the TeX compiler

If you have to find an editor or a command line, you're using the wrong OS.

In Word you just type away.

No. In Word, you have to find the goddamn entry in the wonderful adaptive menu system that your POS operating system has hidden from you. You then have to wait while it starts up, type a little and then swear for good 20 seconds as it crashes and takes your document down with it.

While TeX may not be suitable for producing a glossy mag it is most certainly suitable for desktop publishing of articles, letters and books. I would not be without it. Contrarily, if all the WYSIWYG document applications were to vanish into a black hole tomorrow it would be no bad thing.

Re:Apples to oranges.

[cecom]

Well, I was refering to writing HTML vs WYSIWYG. When you need nice graphics, equations or precise formatting, HTML obviously doesn't cut it, but for many simple cases it works.

Sadly, I can't agree about the portability of LaTeX (except in a theoretical sense that you can convert it to almost anything). I don't remember ever seeing anybody use it under Windows or even outside of academia (and even there not so much anymore). So, at least in some circles it isn't portable at all.

Anyway, the point I was trying to raise (going further and further offtopic) is that WYSIWYAF (what you see is what you asked for) is much better for writing complex documents. Since it has some learning curve, fewer people use it every day and I bet most computer users don't even know it exists (I can use my whole family as an example).

Whole books are being written in MS Word these days and I even doubt that all publishers accept LaTeX. Terrible.

Steve Jobs has read them...

[deunhido]

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."

"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.

From folklore.org

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[MemoryDragon]

Lets leave Word aside, which is absymal... but, most people who compare LaTeX to text processors forget, that LaTeX sort of is a templating collection for TeX. Just like good templates can give you professional results in a good text processor, LaTeX does for TeX. The problem with Word and OpenOffice (and LaTeX) is that they miss totally the angle of how a modern text processor has to be implemented. Those programs orientate themselves on a typwriter style with a line being the basic formatting element. In an age of graphical UIs this approach is totally bogus. A modern text processor should be frame based with an adjustable z order and good templates which should give professional results. Framemaker did, so does KWord and the new Apple program. A modern text processor should be more like a DTP program than a typing program or an extended typewriter.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[aquin]

but for anything more than a few pages, Word falls on its face

You have to consider: it is called Word. It could have been called Sentence or Paragraph or even Book.
But it is called Word...

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[unknown_host]

Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on Computer Science was the greatest.

Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"

Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"

Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

i use Palatino for all books i convert from Project Gutenberg in LaTeX via pdftex. gothic novels look super with that! I like it better than Times or Bookman and it's easier to read on my screen imo. the Computer Modern font fits perfectly with math, but is not too sexy as text only font. oh and i saw really good-looking books that used sans-serif fonts with right metrics

Flamebait?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose the poster was trying to make a joke. Anyone knows he Knuth is the author of TeX.

Funny, but I heard it before...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the opportunity to see Prof. Knuth lecture this wednesday, and in the lecture he made the exact same joke (comparing TAOCP to star wars prequels).
He also mentioned the fasciscle and pre-fascicle publication of vol 4, stating that the first fascicle should be out within a month. He further said that the publishing company had pledged to make the fascicles inexpensive, which would probably mean a self-destructing binding set to fall apart when the full volume comes out.

Oh, and the lecture was on discrete math, or possibly on the relationship between the mathematical model of physics and discrete math... the relationship between "topplings" of the grain of sand model and numbers of spanning trees in a graph.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[brwski]

Wow. Step away from the coffee. Step back from the coffee. Good. Good ranter. The only reason TeX output looks bad to you is that you're jittering so much...

Two points:

• Wanting things done right and then going out and doing them is frightfully unusual. O that we would all be so devoted to our work.
• Check out the vast number of unfinished pieces of art in the world: many of them are so shockingly good that their unfinished nature does not harm their value. Read The Faerie Queene or The Man Without Qualities, and this idea might start to make sense (or else check out the article on The Ocean of Story in Barth's The Friday Book, to get an idea of a project that prevents itself from being finished by its very nature. One might even say those storytellers anticipated Incompleteness). Some works simply cannot be finished, as a particular plan/structure may be such as to generate more and more of itself. A never-ending fugue, indeed.

brwski

Photo of the cover!

[Admiral Burrito]

Here's a photo of the cover.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[my_haz]

TeX was made to facilitate in literate programming. i.e. documentation and src in the same document. I wish more people would use this method. It really catches alot of bugs. Its a must for generic programing. Personally i enjoy using nuweb http://nuweb.sourceforge.net/ . For the interested check out comp.programming.literate some time.

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[mountain_penguin]

while Dijkstra was still trying to find the shortest path to the conference

Re:So who is Art, anyway? How does Mad Magazine fi

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

The Mad Magazine story is, if not true, at least a well propagated lie:

According to the story MAD published Knuths "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" in 1957. In the article the basic unit of force was named "whatmeworry" and the fundamental unit of length was defined as the thickness of MAD magazine #26. These scientific breakthroughs are now known as the first publication of Professor Knuth - he must be proud.

The Art of Wasting Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't he publish "The Art of Computer Programming" in 1968, when he was still at Caltech (according to the preface to the first edition, which was written from Pasadena, California) , just before he arrived at Stanford?

Over thirty years later after finishing the third volume, he's almost finished with its successor. That's way too long, pretty inexecusable, and bordering on the laughable.

The greatest computer scientist in the world created, in the intervening years from third volume to retirement, the ...TeX.

A typesetting language.

Not HTML.

Not the World Wide Web.

Not the Internet.

A typesetting language so that nerdy graduate students could have an excuse for not socializing or doing original work while they fiddled around for hours using TeX to pretty-print their papers. After all, they are "working on the computer", aren't they?

Is this what Arthur C. Clarke thought we'd be doing in the year 2001? I don't seem to remember that "Dave" was conversing with the computer HAL via TeX formatted files. HAL was able to comprehend people just by READING THEIR LIPS, for crying out loud.

By contrast, consider a 27 page Ph.D. thesis written by a guy named John Forbes Nash back in 1950 at Princeton University. With no TeX in those days, the double-spaced typewritten thesis has hand-written mathematical formulae and Greek symbols scribbled among and in between the lines. That thesis would win Nash the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. If I recall correctly, you can see an actual-sized reproduction of the entire thesis, complete with hand-written scribbles, in the book The Essential John Nash . (Somehow, the hand-written stuff makes you feel as if Nash is sitting in the room with you, and -- corny as it sounds -- closer to his genius, as if you peeked inside his diary or something. )

You don't need TeX to be successful; you just have to have good ideas, and you need to be spending time developing those good ideas rather than iteratively kerning your fonts.

Just what did Knuth do?

http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932

Re:The Art of Wasting Time

[1729]

Didn't he publish "The Art of Computer Programming" in 1968, when he was still at Caltech (according to the preface to the first edition, which was written from Pasadena, California) , just before he arrived at Stanford?

Over thirty years later after finishing the third volume, he's almost finished with its successor. That's way too long, pretty inexecusable, and bordering on the laughable.

Uh, he's done a lot more during that time. Published some other quite useful books (Concrete Mathematics, for example), a lot of papers, a lot of original results. I see papers by Knuth show up in math journals regularly.

The greatest computer scientist in the world created, in the intervening years from third volume to retirement, the ...TeX.

Yes, among other things. Does everything Knuth does have to be revolutionary? For what it's worth, TeX is an amazing type-setting system. Perhaps you don't know how bad math type-setting had become by the time Knuth was motivated to write TeX. Take a look at Marcus's Number Fields, for example. Amazon will let you view some of the pages. It's a great book, but horribly type set. Maybe you don't care about those things. Some of us do.

By contrast, consider a 27 page Ph.D. thesis written by a guy named John Forbes Nash back in 1950 at Princeton University. With no TeX in those days, the double-spaced typewritten thesis has hand-written mathematical formulae and Greek symbols scribbled among and in between the lines. That thesis would win Nash the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. If I recall correctly, you can see an actual-sized reproduction of the entire thesis, complete with hand-written scribbles, in the book The Essential John Nash . (Somehow, the hand-written stuff makes you feel as if Nash is sitting in the room with you, and -- corny as it sounds -- closer to his genius, as if you peeked inside his diary or something. )

What the hell does this have to do with anything? Yes, Nash did great work without TeX. Good for him. (By the way, ask somebody older than yourself what it was like preparing a mathematics dissertation before the advent of TeX. Go ahead, I'll wait.)

Really, though, are you trying to imply that Knuth hasn't done a substantial of significant research? Are you that ignorant? Kunth's work comprises much more than TAOCP and TeX.

Re:The Art of Wasting Time

[WillAdams]

At the time that TeX was developed there weren't any computer typesetting systems to speak of, and non which handled mathematics adquately (later there was Penta, but say again how an author was to provide source files for typesetting? Oh, handwritten, huh? And how would one work collaboratively by e-mail? Wait! I know, you'd write it out by hand and have it recognized by the computer and converted to a textual representation as is done by http://www.caisystem.co.jp/infty/ [1]).

TeX gets used for a lot more than just mathematics too. Take a look at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase or consider things like Germany's on-line railroad timetables, or http://custompub.aimsapp.com --- or the lovely coffee table book _Life Cast: Behind the Mask_ by Willa Shalit which was typeset in TeX because no compositor using WYSIWYG tools considered it feasible to do.

William

[1] For those who don't want to take the time to follow the link, the Infty editor converts handwritten mathematics into LaTeX ;)

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[808140]

while Dijkstra was still trying to find the shortest path to the conference

Yes, apparently he was told just to go to the conference, but he considered that advice harmful.

But when will it be published?

[Anonymous Coward]

But when will it be published?

About the same time the port of Duke Nukem Forever to GNU Hurd is complete.

Computer programming is not an art

[Napoleon Blownapart]

Computer programming is not an art, it is a craft.

Knuth Vaporware

[Mad Martigan]

I hear they're bundling Duke Nukem Forever with Knuth's ACP vol. 4. Might just be a rumor, though ...

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[hankwang]

Compare the submission guidelines for sending an article to any The Physical Review journals in any of the TeX variants they prefer to that of doing a submission with MS Word.

You forgot to mention that they have a Word to LaTeX convertor, and that they subsequently convert everything to the XYVision content-management and typesetting system, which is not LaTeX (although they might have a TeX engine for the equations) As much as I like LaTeX, it is not suitable for producing a journal that has hundreds of authors in every issue with a team of editors. A funny macro by an author on page 1 could interfere with the typesetting of another article on page 187, go try and debug that.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I like the most is about LaTeX is that its hard to do ugly design. Unless you put alot of work into violating it, the document just looks neat.
Im just interested in the information, if the author have other hobbies like typesetting and page design, he can do that elsewere, I got to museums and galleried for art.

$2.56

[200_success]

You can still get $2.56 for each bug found, I believe.

Yes, that offer still stands. Apparently, he has solved the micropayment problem.

Re:$2.56

[jschrod]

He sends cheques from Wells Fargo Bank; they have a nice layout.

The micropayment solutions is simple: They tend not get chached, usually. E.g., I have a few of them on my office wall... :-)

Re:$2.56

[WillAdams]

You're basing that on Dr. Kinch's posted cheque?

I'm afraid Dr. Knuth has since switch banks (or uses a different account for errors found in his books than for errors found in tex) --- my reward check was a more prosaic / typical format, the faux parchment / antique scheme which one can get from most banks.

William

Re:$2.56

[jschrod]

I'm basing that on the five cheques that I got for TeX-related errors, the one cheque that I got for an error in TACP in Vol.2, and on the 20+ cheques that Frank Mittelbach got as well. Frank is the only person I know who actually cashed some of his cheques. (Btw, I'm a member of the LaTeX core team.)

Re:$2.56

[WillAdams]

I'm envious ;)

Definitely different accounts for the software and the books then (which I guess isn't surprising).

So, my guess is not a spiffy looking Wells Fargo cheque for erros in the fascicles (but it's still way cool to get regardless)

William

Re:$2.56

[rssrss]

The micropayment solutions is simple: They tend not get chached, usually. E.g., I have a few of them on my office wall... :-)

I think what you mean to say was that they tend not to get cashed, because they tend to get cached.

Re:$2.56

[Fenris Ulf]

My check (from a 1997 TAOC bibliography lookup) was written against America California Bank, has he changed banks?

Re:$2.56

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what you MEANT to say WAS "meant" or "is".

Re:$2.56

[ahdeoz]

Yeah, nobody ever cashes it.

Re:$2.56

[jschrod]

He seems to be using several banks, as other posters have told as well. My first cheque is from 1983, and my last one from 2001. All were from Wells Fargo.

Re:$2.56

[legirons]

"The micropayment solutions is simple: They tend not get chached"

You know you're a computer scientist when you ask to cache a cheque...

Re:$2.56

[jschrod]

:-)

Or a non-native English speaker.

Moderation

[jjga]

It is good to see that people here have a good sense of humor.

Re:Moderation

[rbarreira]

Don't worry, you're not alone

Test your links!

[tootlemonde]

It's Xyvision

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[orasio]

Bad choosing of words for that joke.
God, or Linus wouldn't have called "Linux" an OS.
God, because if he existed, he would know what a kernel is, and what an OS is.
Linus, out of fear of death by the hands of RMS, yelling: "the OS is GNU/Linux, Linux is just a kernel!!!".

Volume 6 Will Contain A Proof

[R.Caley]

That completion such a text takes exponetial time WRT the number of words alrady written.

1. Write Vols 1-3
2. ?????
3. Publish!!!!!!

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[miskatonic alumnus]

Of course, one can always change the line spacing and the fonts in TeX. I use LaTeX for nearly everything I write. One of the many reasons I like it is its flexibility. When I use Word, I feel like I'm constantly fighting the damned thing.

Re:Knuth isn't God..

[rbarreira]

<Insert street semaphore joke here>

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[chthonicdaemon]

See, that's where I would advise people not to use LaTeX (when lots of frames and stuff are involved). TeX (and LaTeX) where explicitly designed for linear, information-dense documents. The formatting is actually an important aid in reading these documents. I have to read many articles a day, and I am very happy that the major scientific journals still use TeX to typeset their documents -- they all look good and are easy to read.

When you start talking about graphical design and frames and whatnot, you are not really in the space that LaTeX was designed for (even though these guys used it for their magazine). I would likewise discourage people from using low-level PostScript code to do CAD drawings. Hammers for nails and screwdrivers for screws, ya know...

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[daniel_mcl]

"It's a Turing-complete language, you see, highly useful for people who want to solve the Halting Problem..."

As will be learned in an introductory course in computer science, a key property of the Halting Problem is that it cannot be solved by a language which is only Turing-complete (isomorphic to a Turing machine). There is thus a strong inclination to believe that you do not, in fact, know what the halting problem is and have just inserted a term which you have at some point heard used in conjunction with Turing machines into your essay in a failed attempt to impart a touch of intellectual sophistication. This calls the rest of the piece into question as well; how many times did you gamble on something you didn't understand an manage to produce a brief allusion which is not visibly incorrect?

"... results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word..."

If your assertion is that Times New Roman and Courier are better-looking than Computer Modern, you're putting yourself at odds with industry and academia alike. It's a noble attempt to take up the mantle of Gallileo, but you must remember than in order to be persecuted for being right one must first be right.

TeX is the best mathematical typesetting system available today, and is used for all major mathematical journals for this reason. As TeX is generally used to produce postscript output, it's quite easy to make use of any postscript font one wishes, but computer modern should really suffice in most cases.

"Like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony..."

The first movement of Shubert's unfinished symphony stands on its own, almost as a sort of program piece, and this is why the symphony is so popular. Nobody expects a third movement, and indeed very few particularly care for the second.

Having shown a complete lack of the most basic knowledge in relation to mathematics, computers, music, literature, and several other areas of knowledge, you should strongly consider returning to school and completing your high school degree in order to help you form coherent, relevant essays if you wish to further pursue book criticism.

proper latex font access (was Re:Eh, mediocre...)

[WillAdams]

Actually, the use of standard PostScript fonts probably would've been:

\usepackage{pslatex}

That said, \usepackage{times} is obsolete (see the PSNFSS docs), instead use:

\usepackage{mathptmx}

If instead you want Palatino (well, URW's knock-off):

\usepackage{mathpazo}

Other font-oriented packages to try:
- helvet
- avant
- courier
- chancery
- bookman
- newcent
- utopia
- charter

as well as packages for Euler, and to match Utopia, use the fourier package to get matching math fonts.

and those are just the freely available options. Lots more if one wants to purchas font sets.

See http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for a sample of what can be done with TeX / LaTeX / ConTeXt &c.

another pretty cool example is up at:

http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/

William
(ob. discl. some stuff from my portfolio is in the above, http://members.aol.com/willadams )

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[MemoryDragon]

I guess you got the point, but the problem is, that most cases nowadays are in need for non linear document layouts and most people misuse word and other linear editors for such layouts without knowing any better. Frame based layouts. That is what modern printers are designed for and that is what modern computers can do, but yet most word processing programs still follow the old route, which was feasable until dot matrix printers were phased out and every computer got a gui. I think it is time to move on and ditch word and other programs (including LaTeX for those cases) in favor of a standardized DTP format, good DTP centric word processing software, and a huge set of freely available templates built upon this infrastructure.

Re:So who is Art, anyway? How does Mad Magazine fi

[Anonymous Coward]

So where are your scientific breakthroughs? Jackass.

Politically Incorrect Troll Here...

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"
Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"
Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."

Stallman would undoubtedly participate in a conversation like that.

Don't know about Linus's thoughts on the matter.

I should imagine, however, that Knuth would never be caught dead uttering such a thing:

Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
PDF DOCUMENT: john316.pdf

Bookpool!

[WPIDalamar]

I used to work for bookpool (4 or so months ago). They're a great group of people dedicated to serving the customer. Little known fact: They are on the Island of Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts!

Their prices are usually the best around, and they ship things out quick. So after the slashdotting, be sure to check them out for tech books.

I'm curious... how many people had heard of them before today?

Re:Bookpool!

[Anonymous Coward]

They are great. I bought my copy of Lisp in Small Pieces from them- they had the best price among the legit looking internet stores. They definitely do seem to have the best prices- their selection is not that great though.

Re:Bookpool!

[booch]

I think a lot of the Slashdot crowd knows about Bookpool. When I started my job 3.5 years ago, I treated myself to $600 worth of books from there. Well, $1000 worth of books, for $600. They've got a pretty good selection of computer books (although not quite as extensive as I'd like) and their prices are competitive with Amazon. (Sometimes they're a little higher, usually a little lower.) And they only charge what it costs them to ship, which is nice, especially for multi-book orders.

I'm glad to hear that they're also a good company of nice people.

Not necessarily

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's on your bookshelf, people may be impressed when they see it.

You'll score with the ladies for sure!

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[PurpleWizard]

Book what a great name for a "word processor".

Bookshelf

[Anonymous Coward]

"It'll be a pleasure to add it to my bookshelf. "

I'm hoping to get a leather bound set when it's all done for my bookshelf. I hope they publish it that way, and I hope he completes it some day. It'll be a classic technical work for hundreds (thousands?) of years.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't. Art, that is; it's a book of mathematical formulae with no art whatever in it. Knuth, a talented animator in his spare time, clearly knew a thing or two about art, so quite why he chose to bring the word "art" into the title of a wholly non-artistic computer manual is beyond me.

Possibly for the same reason that universities typically give graduates in mathematics the degree of Bachelor of Arts?

Shameless Plug

[Ann Coulter]

I'll give a shameless plug here. I have a transcript of TeX in C on the Centrinia project design branch. This transcript passed the TRIP test. If anyone wants to look at it, the tarball is avaliable at my web site above. The directory is centrinia/design/base/typesetting/TeX6/. Remember, it is still in design and will not be available in the Centrinia library proper for a while.
One of the goals for the transcription is to reimplement the memory system. Another goal is to allow for Unicode. The other and broader goals are to speed up the TeX file compilation process and to generalize anything that I can. I serously doubt that it would be possible to write a specification for the TeX language but if I have the time, resources, and the labor, I would get somene to rewrite the entire TeX system based on defining specifications isomorphic to the WEB file definitions (even though the definitions are not very definite).
In summary, an unstable open source TeX engine written in C that passed the TRIP test is available.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[rxmd]

You have to consider: it is called Word. It could have been called Sentence or Paragraph or even Book.
But it is called Word...

I guess Apple's Pages will really take off, then.

Many own, few read-- usually because they can't!

[Anonymous Coward]

My copy has a personal meaning to me. It belonged to my most-hated-- and most brilliant and insightful-- Comp. Sci. professor, Dr. Lee Hill. I learned /so/ many from him. When he retired, he left his books up for grabs.

In a professional sense, I have had occasion to use Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein's "Introduction to Algorithms" directly for more than one project. I think it is a magnificent tome, and one very well suited for the more erudite craftsman, rather than the world-class expert (Knuth's audience). It's cleverly constructed-- the authors want you to learn the principles, not necessarily the best applications. There's a /lot/ of value, which many programmers (sorry, but usually those without a degree) are too quick deride, in learning these things. To "bash" either work is merely to label oneself a peculiar breed of misanthrope.

In the end, everything for both the workman and the academic alike comes to Knuth's vast an incredible survey of Computer Science, no matter how you slice it. It is very, very hard going to make it through any moment of these, but well worth each struggle and every step. The Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest/Stein book would likely never have existed without this immense undertaking having begun.

Donald E. Knuth has made (ignoring even, things like the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm and his wonderful book, "Surreal Numbers") so many contributions to our field that the naieve attempt of the topic to deride them, or those lucky enough to own even a single volume of "The Art of Computer Programming" (Bach reference, anybody? DK plays the organ, after all...), are absolutely asinine-- and one reason that for my money I really don't have time to post on /. regularly. :)

Now, if you will pardon me... there's code to write.

Forget raw PS, raw PCL is where it's at

[Teogue]

:::sigh:::

I guess us poor chumps who write raw PCL are all but forgotten.

Re:Additional information is online

[sbowles]

Shouldn't that be "'knuff said."?

Good to hear

[Fenris Ulf]

It's good to hear that he's moving back to theoretical work after his most recent book.

Re:So who is Art, anyway? How does Mad Magazine fi

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is true, Knuth lists it in his vita. I have also heard that "Art" is a reference to a computer scientist named Art, but could never remember where I heard this from.

When it's done.

[rice_burners_suck]

But when will it be published?

The first lesson to learn from a Real Programmer, such as Knuth:

It will ship when it's done.

Exclusive Excerpt Volume 4

[manon]

Bookpool has an exclusive excerpt of the book that is going to stand on the shelfs of many /. reader.

PCL?!

[Grendel Drago]

Isn't PCL a yecchy-looking binary language? I remember seeing some raw PCL output and thinking that it looked like line noise. I've seen raw PostScript, which at least one can lex with the naked eye, if not parse.

--grendel drago

Re:PCL?!

[Teogue]

PCL 6 is the yucky raw binary one... PCL 5e (and lower) which a great deal of people still use is quite readable, and while it uses an unprintable character or two, isn't that bad. My humblest of opinions holds that it is superior to PS, but I'm biased.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[danila]

I don't know about TeX, but I had to do about a page of formulas for my thesis. Since it was just a page, I absolutely didn't want to waste time on TeX or anything, but let me tell you, it was damn hard work. :) Interestingly, the reviewer complimented the formulas (Microsoft Equation does look nice) and said most people don't bother and just produce some fugly unreadable shit (ASCII formulas, may be?).