InformIT: Interview with Donald Knuth
An interview with Don Knuth, in which we see him harping on test-driven development and questioning the usefulness of multi-core processors, bashing reusable code (‘To me, “re-editable code” is much, much better than an untouchable black box or toolkit. I could go on and on about this’), and learn that he’s an emacs user, works on an Ubuntu laptop with no internet connection and uses Macs for internet and graphics. What’s striking about it is that although he makes some bombastic claims (“Literate programming is what you need to rise above the ordinary level of achievement”) he’s unusually humble. I mean, he’s Don Knuth! — he could say almost anything, and many would not question it.
For example, after saying that he thinks open source will “begin to be completely dominant as the economy moves more and more from products towards services”, he says:
Remember, though, that my opinion on economic questions is highly suspect, since I’m just an educator and scientist. I understand almost nothing about the marketplace.
When asked about whether he plans to write about concurrent algorithms:
I decided long ago to stick to what I know best. Other people understand parallel machines much better than I do; programmers should listen to them, not me, for guidance on how to deal with simultaneity.
And when asked why literate programming, which he clearly believes is superior to other methods of programming, never caught on, he doesn’t say that the whole world has failed to appreciate its superiority, he says:
Literate programming is a very personal thing. I think it’s terrific, but that might well be because I’m a very strange person.
