For over 40 years, we have recognised the value of #Knuth's #LiterateProgramming. With all the expedient complexity that dominate #IT today, it is perhaps time to revive a tried, tested, and trued old idea of reversing the roles of #comment and #code.

All source files in all languages should be a \(\texttt{.latex}\) or \(\textt{.md}\) text document, interspersed with snippets of code ensconced in demarcated code blocks. Academics habitually use \(\LaTeX\), and IT practitioners commonly use Markdown.

This convention was already in place in way back in the early days of Haskell (proposed by Richard Bird). And today, we use it as a matter of course when using Mathematica and Jupyter.

It is time all programming languages adopt this sensible convention—no, not foist it upon an average coder, but make it convenient for the programmer who wants to follow this convention.

Last night, I had to resort to #Knuth's #Art collection, again. This time, it was Volume III: I was stuck and had to "Search" for some inspiration—"Sort" of.

As I reread the worn out pages of my copy, I thought of how fortunate today's #ComputerScience community is to have a broad, deep collection of theory and practice tomes, to have been shown the way by the likes of Church, Turing, Kleene, Cray, Moore, Patterson, and to be able to rely on the works of earlier masters like Euler, Gauss, Galois, Hilbert, Russell, Gödel.

Then, my thoughts turned to the present state of the #DataScience field. When I observed the birth of this field a few years ago, I dismissed it as superfluous, for the field was carved out of statistics, operations research, and computer science. Over the years, I've had the misfortune to work with a few "data scientists" and "machine learning" experts, whose only skills were calling APIs, like Karas, Torch, Theano, or TensorFlow—all in Python. That didn't improve my views of the field.

But when I examined the current curriculum of the field, it is no better or worse than a typical statistic or computer science curriculum. Top schools offer 😍, middlings offer 😑, and flounders offer 🤢. Conducts of the practitioners reflect their alma maters, not the field, per se. In that respect, data science is just like all other established fields of study. So, I'm holding out a fervent hope that this field matures into a well-founded, well-funded, well-balanced, ethical discipline.

I wonder if mathematicians and electrical engineers looked upon the birth of computer science, back in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and thought it a misstep.

"... and that's how it works."

-- "This scheme seems wrong for [insert obvious reason]."

"Well, that's the beauty of block chain. You see with block chain--"

-- "Block chain?"

"Yeah, with block chain-- Uh, What book is that?"

-- "VADE RETRO SATANA!"

*wham* *wham-wham* *thump*

-- "I got algorithms more complex than block chain stuck in muh teeth, kid. Fancy code don't make pigs fly, and it don't make nonsense true. Now git offa mah lawn, afore I pick up volume 2."

#algorithms #Knuth

Some notes on chapter 1.1 of #Knuth 's "The Art of Computer Programming (volume 1)".

https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/knuth-1-1/

A fascinating conglomerate of countably infinite ordinals and the reals (themselves uncountable).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number

#math #ordinal_number #infinity #omega #Conway #Knuth

A fascinating conglomerate of countably infinite ordinals and the reals (themselves uncountable).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number

#math #ordinal_number #infinity #omega #Conway #Knuth

Quelques tests et réflexions de Donald #Knuth sur #ChatGPT :
https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt

Here's something fun. A dual interview with Programming Visionaries Donald Knuth and Niklaus Wirth from 1985 - https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/interview-with-programming-visionaries #PChistory #Knuth #Wirth

I'm uncertain as to whether I should summarize this as

Turing had his Test, Knuth has his Quiz,

or

Only Donald Knuth can save us from Skynet.

Either way... #Knuth discusses #chatGPT:

https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt

@nix

[1/2] A bit techy, but relevant to writers in all fields.

In the 1970s, computer scientist #DonaldKnuth was unhappy with the quality of the #typesetting for his books. Being #Knuth, he wrote a new programming language to do the job on the computer. This is #TeX, the programme, pronounced "tek" or "tech". An active community develops user-friendly higher-level packages, called #TeXLaTeX.

There are free implementations for most environments. On Windows I use the #MikTex app.

\cont'd

Lesens- und bedenkenswert, werte @ARDde Führungskräfte:
@KaiGniffke @ARD_Presse #buhrow NDR-Intendant #Knuth @AdrianFeuerbach

Wenn letztlich nicht mehr Fakten den Inhalt bestimmen, muss reagiert werden. Entspricht nicht journalistischer #Sorgfaltspflicht 🤔☹️

#Atomausstieg
---
RT @Volksverpetzer
Zum #Atomausstieg legen sich gar Öffentlich-Rechtliche ordentlich ins Zeug, Fakes über #Atomkraft zu verbreiten. Mehrere ARD-Dokus voller…
https://twitter.com/Volksverpetzer/status/1647152225687416832

When Knuth says he

"is strongly opposed to the policy of granting software patents for trivial solutions that should be obvious". (Wikipedia)

that raises the bar quite a bit.

#Knuth #SoftwarePatents

#history #knuth Donald Knuth: “The few papers I've written that have a historical component were among the most difficult I have ever done, and I greatly admire the historians who do it properly."

I suddenly have an urge to build #Knuth ’s #MIX machine with all the extras

From the archives (2016): Hubris https://proftomcrick.com/2016/02/04/hubris/ #knuth

A lecture from a great computer scientist: Professor Knuth.

Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth - Twintrees, Baxter Permutations, and Floorplans (2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg6YRqT4Duo

"Three fascinating concepts, which seem at first to be entirely unrelated to each other, are in fact in one-to-one correspondence, via three beautiful algorithms."

#mathematics #combinatorics #knuth #permutations #algorithm #computer_science

Okay, The Art of Computer Programming vol 4B was been published THREE MONTHS AGO and I'm only finding out about it today? From an off-hand comment on the Other Site, no less?

#knuth #taocp #maths

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

Happy birthday, Donald E. Knuth to your 85th birthday! #DonKnuth #knuth #dek #cs #math

"(...) it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime."
-- Donald E. Knuth

Every once in a while I read this page and envy him so much. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

#Knuth #Email

Is there an #audiobook edition of #Knuth’s Art of #Computer #Programming? 🤔

#newYearsResolution