[HN Gopher] Alan Kay on Donald Knuth
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Alan Kay on Donald Knuth
Author : tosh
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-05-05 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| User23 wrote:
| Dijkstra told similar stories. Working in the immediate post-war
| Netherlands he got something like 30 minutes of machine time a
| week. I may be wrong on the exact amount of time, but it was
| extremely limited.
|
| I believe that, at least until recently, quite a lot of the
| continental European approach to computing science was due to the
| culture those early pressures created.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| In the USA, in the '70's, I had an account on a university
| computer that was good for 4 hours in a month. I think that was
| just a fairly normal thing in the old days, when almost nobody
| had an Apple ][.
| kragen wrote:
| is fermatslibrary alan kay's twitter account? if not, is there a
| better source for this?
| mepian wrote:
| I think he has an HN account.
| vasco wrote:
| Yep https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay
| arendtio wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay
| malux85 wrote:
| I'm 39 now, and I started to code when I was 8. There were a few
| things that I think helped a lot:
|
| No internet forced me to think for myself a lot when I got stuck,
| instead of immediately googling.
|
| Immediate Googling a problem is obviously better for
| productivity, BUT not having this ability grew my working memory
| a lot during my formative years, I still have a very capable
| working memory, which allows me to hold large amounts of code
| (deep call stacks and state) and therefore understand unknown
| code a lot more fully and a lot faster than others. Being able to
| hold large state in memory means I can work on compilers,
| kernels, deep learning frameworks with a wholistic view which
| leads to more consistent interface design and data structures.
|
| Less distractions also grew my focus and attention abilities. I
| am shocked at how little programmers can focus these days, they
| can hardly hold attention for more than 20 seconds without
| jumping to a website / phone / other task.
|
| The system I started with (VIC20) booted into a BASIC interpreter
| - you had no choice but to learn to code!
| manmal wrote:
| You might just be gifted with great memory. I'm not sure
| working memory can really be trained in a significant way.
| Happy to be proven wrong of course.
| marsten wrote:
| It's an interesting idea, that scarcity and inconvenience could
| make one a more thoughtful practitioner.
|
| A similar situation applies to writing. When people wrote with
| quills on parchment under candlelight, they did the structuring
| and editing in their minds beforehand. Now, word processors
| encourage us to vomit words onto the page and rarely do we edit
| them down to a similar level of quality.
| sp332 wrote:
| The furthest back reference I can find for this story is
| https://softpanorama.org/People/Knuth/index.shtml
|
| However, Knuth refuted it. "My program _didn 't_ work the first
| time" https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856
| kepano wrote:
| This seems to be quoting from
| https://softpanorama.org/People/Knuth/index.shtml
|
| > When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s]
| one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a
| computer programming contest with people on research projects in
| the Bay area. The prize I think was a turkey.
|
| > [John] McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that
| Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the
| program running and he also won the fastest execution of the
| algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called
| the Wilbur system. And he basically beat the shit out of
| everyone.
|
| > And they asked him, "How could you possibly do this?" And he
| answered,
|
| > "When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got five
| minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the program
| going, it just had to be written right. So people just learned to
| program like it was carving stone. You sort of have to sidle up
| to it. That's how I learned to program."
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I heard a similar story from a professor who was doing his
| graduate work in mainframe days.
|
| (Paraphrasing) 'When you learn to program on punch card with
| batch jobs, you get really good at writing it correct the first
| time. Because if you write it wrong, it's (a) overnight
| processing to find out, (b) another day to fix it, (c) another
| overnight to get the updated results.'
| openrisk wrote:
| Constraints (to the degree they are not debilitating) can trigger
| creativity, unlock efficiency and sharpen problem solving skills.
|
| Abundance is better than scarcity but it can lead to bloat and
| waste. With strong discipline and a value system that promotes
| lean approaches one might be able to have the best of the two
| worlds.
| anthk wrote:
| Unix/Berkeley vs Lisp/Mit.
| fsckboy wrote:
| the worse is better vs The Right Thing(tm) dichotomy
| encompasses more than availability of resources. It's
| perfectionism vs "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the
| good" 80/20 expediency
| dzink wrote:
| I had to work 3 years to buy a computer in 2001 and in the mean
| time I would volunteer to do networking for internet cafes to get
| a few minutes of coding time after hours. When I finally bought a
| computer, my parents only allowed me to touch it for 24 hours
| each weekend and using that slow dial-up internet connection. I
| made those 24 hrs count. After school, I would read every
| programming book in the bookstore, plan and design and UX my
| projects, so by the time my 24 hours rolled in, I could just
| build. By the time I had finished college, I could tell you all
| the browser mis-behaviors your code would trigger in IE and
| others, by just reading the code.
|
| The 10X+ developers got there by iterating so many times, they
| know how to skip the traps. The more layers of abstraction pile
| up on top of fundamental systems the more variably productive new
| developers become by default, because they become attached to
| abstractions that can and do change, and because the permutations
| of misguided possibilities on top of flawed foundations become so
| abundant that a single person can't strip through the noise.
| That's why additional abstraction and libraries that
| automatically update on top of your existing code are a recipe
| for short-lived work and thus a quick to degrade portfolio.
| Understandable code that doesn't move under your feet is key,
| because you will forget what you did way before what you did
| becomes outdated.
| anthk wrote:
| Transcript with tesseract:
|
| When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s]
| one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a
| programming contest with people on research projects in the Bay
| area. The prize I think was a turkey.
|
| McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that Knuth
| entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program
| running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm.
| He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur
| system. And he basically beat the shit out of everyone.
|
| And they asked him, "How could you possibly do this?" And he
| answered, "When I learned how to program, you were lucky if you
| got five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the
| program going, it just had to be written right. So people just
| learned to program like it was carving in stone. You sort of have
| to sidle up to it. That's how I learned to program.
|
| #--
|
| Made width: wget -c "https://nitter.esmailelb
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| tesseract -l eng a.jpg a.txt
|
| https://twiiit.com will redirect any Twitter URL to Nitter, then
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| Then, the image it's one click away, just download it.
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