it's his brithday, let's celebrate.

recommended doron zeilberger's opinion 86

For God So Loved the World, that He gave [one of his most talented] begotten Sons, that Whoever Masters His Art of Computer-Programming Shall Not Perish and Crash, but have Everlastingly Bug-Free (yet with short-lasting running times) Programs

copied from another celebration, fifty years of progress in software engineering, 1996:

Algorithms Algorithms extend back to the middle ages, and became increasingly important in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Knuth didn't invent algorithms, but he was the first to show how important they are to computer science. The Art of Computer Programming was a break-through because, for the first time, developers could use a book of algorithms like chefs use a book of recipes.

Patterns In 1968, Knuth used English to describe his algorithms. Knuth's use of stylized English presaged the style of patterns by twenty five years [the article was writen 1997]. But until patterns became popular, describing algorithms in English, rather than pseudo-code, seemed old-fashioned. We can think of algorithms and abstract

[goto quarrel] In Structured Programming with Goto Statements, Knuth points out that Schorre was avoiding gotos in 1963 and Landin was avoiding gotos in 1966, but the issue caught fire with Dijkstra's paper in 1968. | software engineering notes, jan 1997