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Donald Knuth shares his life's story (webofstories.com)
131 points by ek on Dec 24, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments



Mr. Knuth is a personal hero of mine both as a programmer and as a Christian. He's pretty awesome.


I received a copy of "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" for Christmas last year, but haven't read it yet (and it's almost been a whole year!) Is that something you've read? and if so, would you recommend it?


Nope sorry, I've only read pieces of his Art of CS book, but I'm also interested in reading 3:16 which I plan on ordering soon.

It's supposed just pick out the verse number 3:16 from every book and join it with any history or texts associated with it. Kinda like sampling.


I have it... I enjoyed it, but it's not this great eye opening religious / philosophical piece. It's mostly a fairly personal story regarding a particular religious project of his...


Is there anywhere a text-only version? I really prefer written words to videos.


If you register, you can view the transcript, but unfortunately it is broken up by video so you can't view the whole thing. And it's unedited, so the stuttering is part of the text.

Edit: Knew I had seen the full text somewhere, managed to find this: https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006


Wow, even the transcript is hard to follow. I wonder if he wishes he could edit it himself, since he is a writer too.


Thank you!


Especially with Mister Knuth, he's borderline stuttering sometimes; hard to follow.


That's not borderline. He certainly has a stutter. I've seen it in all the videos I've ever seen of him. It's a shame seeing someone with such an impressive mind having trouble expressing himself verbally.


His vocal system can't handle his own brain bandwidth I guess.


He uses his brain and language so effectively that some parts of the sentence can actually be used as padding.


[deleted]


Some of us are hard of hearing.


As a current EECS student at Case, this is really interesting. Thanks!


He reveals quite a bit of his character and interests in his seminal Art of Computing series. It's a great read for both it's content and it's prose.


The correct word here is "its", not "it's"


First "it's" is fine. Please submit a patch in the form of a regular expression.


in a case sensitive regular expression replacement, all of the it's should be corrected to its. I agree that the It's is correct, but most regex engines are case sensitive




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