Misfiring Neurons Just another geek with a blog

6May/08Off

Donald Knuth Interview

I came across this fascinating Donald Knuth interview via Artima. A couple of snippets to pique your interest, one on the subject of open source software:

[...] I think that a few programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, will always be superior to competitors like the Gimp—for some reason, I really don’t know why! I’m quite willing to pay good money for really good software [...]

And his opinon of reuse, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

I also must confess to a strong bias against the fashion for reusable code. To me, "re-editable code" is much, much better than an untouchable black box or toolkit. I could go on and on about this. If you’re totally convinced that reusable code is wonderful, I probably won’t be able to sway you anyway, but you’ll never convince me that reusable code isn’t mostly a menace.

Other interesting topics he touches on include multi-core processor architectures and XP. Happy reading!

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