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Donald Knuth #programming #emacs #fvwm

Here is an interview with Donald Knuth, where he - among many other things - expresses his lack of enthusiasm for multicore processors:

They think a magic bullet will come along to make multicores speed up my kind of work; I think it's a pipe dream. (No - that's the wrong metaphor! "Pipelines" actually work for me, but threads don't. Maybe the word I want is "bubble.")

Here's a quote on the subject of litterate programming:

Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets.

Bonus info: These days Donald Knuth uses Emacs and FVWM on Ubuntu for real work :-)

Oh, and this on software developement:

With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, let me just say that almost everything I’ve ever heard associated with the term "extreme programming" sounds like exactly the wrong way to go...with one exception. The exception is the idea of working in teams and reading each other’s code. That idea is crucial, and it might even mask out all the terrible aspects of extreme programming that alarm me.