
Interview with Donald Knuth (Emacs and Ubuntu user) - pchristensen
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856
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nunb
>I know that important applications for parallelism exist—rendering graphics,
breaking codes, scanning images, simulating physical and biological processes,
etc. But all these applications require dedicated code and special-purpose
techniques, which will need to be changed substantially every few years.

Interesting... not that it pays to go against The Knuth, but surely this is
the same argument that's been made countless times before when it comes to
hardware advances?

It seems to me that someone will come up with a compiler/code technique to
present a uniform interface to these "special-purpose techniques", the way
OpenGL did for graphics, or MapReduce for multiprocessing or TCP for network
access, or.. and who was it who said that essentially every advance/new
technique in CS comes from indirection?

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baha_man
I found this very interesting:

'the idea of... "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely... lots of time is
wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about.
Nothing needs to be "mocked up."'

