Donald Knuth: A Life’s Work Interrupted

Len Shustek, Editor
In this second of a two-part interview by Edward Feigenbaum, we find Knuth, having completed three volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, drawn to creating a system to produce books digitally.
Don switches gears and for a while and becomes what Ed Feigenbaum calls “The World’s Greatest Programmer.”
There was a revolutionary new way to write programs that came along in the 1970s called “structured programming.” At Stanford we were teaching students how to write programs, but we had never really written more than textbook code ourselves in this style. Here we are, full professors, telling people how to do it, but having never done it ourselves except in really sterile cases with no real-world constraints. I was itching to do it. Thank you for calling me the world’s greatest programmer— I was always calling myself that in my head. I love programming, and so I loved to think that I was doing it as well as anybody. But the fact is the new way of programming was something that I hadn’t had time to invest much effort in.
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