Programming Is Legitimate And Necessary Academic Endeavour.

It Would Be Nice If We Could Design A Virtual Reality In Hyperbolic Space, And Meet Each Other There.

Let Us Change Our Traditional Attitude To The Construction Of Programs. Instead Of Imagining That Our Main Task Is To Instruct A Computer What To Do, Let Us Concentrate Rather On Explaining To Human Beings What We Want A Computer To Do.

In Fact, My Main Conclusion After Spending Ten Years Of My Life Working On The Tex Project Is That Software Is Hard. It's Harder Than Anything Else I've Ever Had To Do.

I Remember That Mathematicians Were Telling Me In The 1960s That They Would Recognize Computer Science As A Mature Discipline When It Had 1,000 Deep Algorithms. I Think We've Probably Reached 500.

Programmers Waste Enormous Amounts Of Time Thinking About, Or Worrying About, The Speed Of Noncritical Parts Of Their Programs, And These Attempts At Efficiency Actually Have A Strong Negative Impact When Debugging And Maintenance Are Considered. We Should Forget About Small Efficiencies, Say About 97% Of The Time: Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil. Yet We Should Not Pass Up Our Opportunities In That Critical 3%.