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kragen
knuth-interview-2006
Learning & Reference2010–2024
kragen / knuth-interview-2006

knuth-interview-2006

The transcript of a Donald Knuth interview in 2006

Learning & Reference
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
11Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
229GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The transcript of a Donald Knuth interview in 2006

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:59:22 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year17 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2010-05-31 02:09:31 UTC to 2024-07-26 22:53:13 UTC.

01232010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
kragen·Jun 16, 2019
A lot of novices think that, but it turns out that there are many problems that are easy to find by code reviews that are hard to find by testing. (And vice versa — testing is very valuable, especially with things like Hypothesis.) I'm skeptical that the scope of things you can get working at all by mindlessly banging on tests without thinking about the problem is very large, and when you add other aspects of the software development lifecycle, your prospects seem very slender indeed. If reading your code takes "ages", how are you going to figure out how to extend it next week when you need to change what it does? How are you going to debug it when it crashes once you put in production? I have written compilers in a somewhat test-driven fashion, and I am especially skeptical that you can purely TDD a compiler. Certainly I've never see
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n it done. I'm far more skeptical that you could TDD a compiler written in assembly language that achieves the kind of performance this scenario implies. (But tests, especially regression tests, are extremely valuable for writing compilers.) The particular compiler we're talking about here was one Knuth wrote during a summer-long road trip for US$5500 (roughly US$120 000 today). So the situation was actually considerably more extreme than you're imagining — not only did he not have punch cards when he wrote the compiler, he'd never seen the computer. So he had to spend a few months debugging it after he actually finished driving to the other side of the continent where the computer was. https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006#27---writing-...
In Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player (2011)
svat·Apr 18, 2019
This is in fact one of several oral histories that Knuth has done over the last few years: * 2001, 2 hours audio (http://purl.umn.edu/96227), 27-page transcript (https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107413) (partial I guess?) * 2006, Web of Stories, 7.5 hours video in 97 short parts https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1Jq... , transcript (https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006) * 2007, interview by Ed Feigenbaum, 3 hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp7GAKLSGnI) + 4 hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqPPll3uDa0), 73-page transcript (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...) * 2018, this one (https://purl.stanford.edu/jq248bz8097), about 4.5 hours, 177-page transcript (but 50 pages of those are Knuth's CV!) * 2018, by the Computer History Museum, 1.5 hours, specifically about
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the earliest programs he wrote as an undergrad when he first encountered computers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9JOrmgHw28): the programs themselves are here: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=X8738.... (in machine language / assembly) I've watched the Web of Stories one fully (and the others not yet fully)… they are a delight. You can see the way his mind works, and he's someone whose career has spanned basically the entirety of computer science as a separate academic discipline.
In Donald E. Knuth: An Oral History (2018) [video]
hackermailman·Mar 26, 2019
Knuth has an interesting take on this, as he learned by reading programs. He claims if the programs he first saw were too good, he wouldn't have bothered with programming: https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006/blob/master/R... "I read the manuals that came from IBM, and it had; the manuals had example programs in there, and I thought of better ways to write those programs. I thought of, you know, well, okay, this program works, but if you did it this way, it would be even better. And so that’s given me some confidence that maybe I had a talent for programming. Now, if the manual hadn’t had these bad examples in it, I probably would not have gotten interested in programming, because I wouldn’t have this confidence, and I would have been scared and say, oh, I would never think of this.But the fact is, the manuals were pretty stupi
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d, and that’s what gave me the confidence that I should think a little more about programming, because I might be, you know, I might be good at it."
In Learning from Code vs. Plagiarism

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