From: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
To: Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>, TUHS@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Knuth and Pascal (was "Were cron and at ...")
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 12:27:07 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <24BAE60C-0E4B-4C8B-AA18-872DC055C56D@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <64006DF6-FBE1-4F0E-9C45-64A5280FED50@iitbombay.org>
> On Dec 15, 2020, at 12:18 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:
>
>> On Dec 15, 2020, at 3:46 AM, M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I'm glad he didn't. He might have written it in Mix. Knuth once said
>> he didn't believe in higher-level languages. Of course he knew more
>> about them than anybody else and was CACM's associate editor for the
>> subject--like a minister who doesn't believe in God.
>>
>
> Did he actually say that? In this delightful interview
>
The strong impression I got from _Coders at Work_ is that Knuth, while perfectly capable in HLLs, prefers writing in MIX/MMIX simply because he finds it more fun than languages that provide you with prerolled abstractions. It’s a charming book, although I think the Knuth chapter is the best.
Adam
prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-12-15 19:27 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-12-15 11:45 M Douglas McIlroy
2020-12-15 13:04 ` Toby Thain
2020-12-15 19:18 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-15 19:27 ` Adam Thornton [this message]
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