Igor Delovski Board

delovski · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 3524 Location: Zagreb

delovski · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 3524 Location: Zagreb

Salon: The art of Don E. Knuth

"Donald Ervin Knuth is trying to explain what has delayed work on Volume 4
of his magnum opus. <<I've never been a good estimator of how long things
are going to take,>> he says."

delovski · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 3524 Location: Zagreb

Slashdot: Donald Knuth Rips On Unit Tests and More

"You may be familiar with Donald Knuth from his famous Art of Computer
Programming books but he's also the father of TeX and, arguably, one of
the founders of open source. There's an interesting interview where he
says a lot of stuff I wouldn't have predicted. One of the first surprises to
me was that he didn't seem to be a huge proponent of unit tests.

I use JUnit to test parts of my projects maybe 200 times a day but Knuth
calls that kind of practice a "waste of time" and claims "nothing needs to
be 'mocked up.'" He also states that methods to write software to take
advantage of parallel programming hardware (like multi-core systems that
we've discussed) are too difficult for him to tackle due to ever changing
hardware. He even goes so far as to vent about his unhappiness toward
chipmakers for forcing us into the multicore realm. He pitches his idea of
"literate programming" which I must admit I've never heard of but find it
intriguing.

At the end, he even remarks on his adage that young people shouldn't do
things just because they're trendy. Whether you love him or hate him, he
sure has some interesting/flame-bait things to say."

XNote · Kapetan Joined: 16 Jun 2006 Posts: 532

MMIX - MMIX may also refer to the year 2009, in Roman numerals

"MMIX (pronounced em-mix) is a 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture
(ISA) designed by Donald Knuth, with significant contributions by John L.
Hennessy (who contributed to the design of the MIPS ISA) and Richard L.
Sites (who was an architect of the Alpha ISA)."