Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth - Twintrees, Baxter Permutations, and Floorp... https://youtu.be/zg6YRqT4Duo via @YouTube

#DonaldKnuth

@AlgoCompSynth
That's so weird, I was just talking about Knuth with a friend here a couple of days ago. It must be a sign.

His "The Art of Computer Programming" was a sacred text for me at one time, though I'm ashamed to say I never worked my way through it completely.

In the statuary hall in my head, he's in the same room as Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and Charles Babbage.

@AndyLowry I don't know anyone who's made it all the way through TAOCP - even Knuth hasn't. 😈

I gave up on it - too much discrete math for my tastes. I was much more interested in scientific applications than discrete math.

@AlgoCompSynth
I didn't know he hadn't totally worked through it himself. 😆

I was a sysadmin for about twenty years, but never thoroughly learned any programming language. I kept bumping into situations that required a tine little utility of some kind-- for example, I once needed something that would check to see if a cell data connection was live, and if not, restart its process to get back online-- and would pop in and out of Knuth to see if my problem had already been solved more efficiently than whatever my first idea was.

Got a tiny amount of familiarity with Python (mostly for Excel macros), C (did some little automation stuff for Linux server maintenance) and, just because it had a different approach to logic than I would naturally have, Ruby. Knuth was always there to help me find a way to think about whatever the issue was.

I'd always planned to go through the whole thing as a keep-the-brain-working challenge when I retired. But then when I actually did retire, I found that I had more fun things to do than that, so I gave the set to a friend who actually works as a programmer. 😉