
Knuth versus Email (1999) - joshuacc
http://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html
======
tomohawk
I had an uncle who was a vice president at a fortune 50 company. The
executives at the company were not allowed to have a computer at their desks.
They all had secretaries who dealt with email, calendars, spreadsheets, etc.
The point was that if they were sitting behind a computer doing time consuming
clerical work required to interact with a computer, they were being distracted
from much more important tasks. The company was more interested in having
people at that level who could delegate and organize than to actually do the
work themselves.

The skills and kind of work that makes a person successful at one level often
leads to lack of success at another.

~~~
petejansson
While I agree with your premise about different types of work, and while I
agree there's some level of clerical work required to interact with a
computer, computers can do far more than clerical work, and can provide
intellectual leverage when used properly. Banning a high-level executive from
using something that gives them intellectual leverage holds the organization
back.

~~~
MichaelBurge
You have to think, people - especially senior executives at fortune 50
companies - don't like being arbitrarily held back when they have a job to do.
If they want to use a computer, I imagine that these ambitious people would
fight the CEO tooth and nail to get access to one. Probably people on the
board whom the CEO is politically motivated to please are also banned from
using these computers.

People tend not to ban things before they're widely used and cause some sort
of problem. I imagine there was a time at his company where his executives
used computers. People would have a memory of the time before the computer
ban, and compare it every day to the time after the computer ban.

These executives probably had stellar track records, had the motivation to do
better, had the previous experience of using computers, had political sway,
and still failed to convince the CEO.

And yet, with nothing more than a brief description of the abstract idea, and
a firm belief that computers are valuable, a Hacker News commenter has been
able to diagnose that it's holding their company back.

That's not to say that CEOs can't make bad decisions, but we don't even know
what the company does or what they sell. Probably neither of us have worked
there. It seems a little premature to rebel at his decision.

------
jrcii
I was reminded of RMS's autoreply:

I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am located
somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear
to be well outside the solar system.

After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of
incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of
the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your message
at some point. If I write a response immediately, it will go out in the next
outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your message, but
occasionally sooner or later than that. Please expect a minimum delay of
between 24 and 48 hours in receiving a response to your mail to me.

If your message is hard to understand or responding takes real work, the
response could take longer.

So please wait 48 hours after sending a message before you resend it, remind
me about it, or ask if I have received it. If it has been less than 48 hours,
the absence of a response from me only means you have not given me time to
answer.

If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each
message you receive from me is a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours
earlier, and when writing it, I probably had not yet downloaded your later
mail.

If you are in big hurry to speak with me, and one day's delay would be a
serious problem, you can ask my FSF assistant to phone me. Send mail to <rms-
assist@fsf.org> saying what you would like to talk with me about, and giving
your telephone number. You can also call the Free Software Foundation office
at 617-542-5942 (weekday Boston business hours) and ask them to phone me on
your behalf. If it's really important, try both!

An intermediate measure is to email me your phone number and ask me to phone
you.

But if there isn't enough hurry to warrant phoning me, please don't bother the
FSF people. The mail you already sent me will reach me before any mail they
could send me now on your behalf. I will respond as soon as I can.

To contact the Free Software Foundation, use one of the addresses in
[https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/email](https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/email).

If you do not wish to receive this message ever again, please send a message
to rms-autoreply-control@gnu.org with the subject "OFF". Otherwise, you might
receive a reply like this one up to once a month.

~~~
hengheng
So he's self-centered enough that he expects everybody to read through all of
this essay. Interesting.

~~~
jegoodwin3
Actually, back in the 80s, people normally wrote email of about that length,
and since gaming was uncommon, had the leisure to read well-written prose from
their peers.

Sometime around 2000, busy people started complaining about this practice, and
old timers started to hold their tongues. I knew the era was over when my
Millennial co-worker one cube away asked me to not interrupt him and IM him
instead, since he had to take off his earphones. About the same time, my boss
complained about how long my (senior engineer, explaining matters related to
the immanent demise of the company...) emails were -- frankly managers were
busy and 1-2 sentence ought to explain about this O-ring problem.

Your projection of self-centeredness on the part of your elders is unbecoming
and ill-informed. You are merely young.

rms is just old school.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
I am young. RMS has written a very simple email, well laid out and information
dense. There is no external referencing and it is easy to skim read.

I find most "short" messages lack key details, requiring me to either search
out more information, request a clarification, or abandon the conversation
(due to anticipation of the pain continued communication would cause). This is
more time and mentally expensive to me than reading a longer more precise
message.

------
overgard
I don't really understand why people become so anti-email. I'm a deeply
introverted person, so it's not like I don't understand wanting to be left
alone, but if I don't want to be interrupted... I close my email viewer. The
asynchronous nature of email makes it great for introverted people. I used to
get a TON of email at one of my prior jobs, and, like, it was fine. Just wait
till it's convenient to open it. If it's actually urgent they'll call or send
an IM.

I'm not accusing Knuth of this, but I think some people just use email as a
way of humble-bragging. "I'm so important it's overwhelming!" Yeah wow. We're
all so impressed.

~~~
harryf
> I'm a deeply introverted person

That there might be why you haven't learnt to hate Email (or other forms of
asynchronous communication). If you want to learn to hate, try running a few
mildly successful Open Source projects. Or try participating in other lame
company flame email thread.

The fundamental problem with email (and other forms of asynchronous electronic
comms including Github pull requests and Facebook messages) is there's little
burden on the sender. The entire burden is carried by the recipient. It's too
easy for the sender to turn impulse into wasting someone else's time. Snail
mail at least costs a stamp and a trip to the letter box.

TLDR: Right now email doesn't scale

~~~
baudehlo
Email has been scaling just fine for years. And I've run some reasonably
successful open source projects (including SpamAssassin at the height of its
success). I really don't see the problem.

The fact that an email is easy to send without knowing the recipient is a huge
benefit of email. No other electronic communication system offers this benefit
(and unfortunately it enables spam, but that's an entirely different
discussion).

~~~
kshitijl
The whole point is that it enables spam, broadly interpreted to include
unsolicited mail of all kinds.

------
s4chin
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of
things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." Wow!

~~~
greenyoda
I think that many of us have jobs in which we have to be both "on top of
things" and "on the bottom of things" to varying degrees.

For example, when I'm trying to write a tricky piece of code, it goes much
better if I can shut out interruptions like Knuth does and concentrate on the
task at hand. If people expected me to reply immediately to their non-urgent
e-mails, it would be a lot harder to concentrate.

Also, people who expect me to answer their e-mail or phone call immediately
are making the presumption that whatever they have to ask me is more important
than whatever I currently happen to be doing. In most cases, it's not.

------
brudgers
Previous HN discussion of Knuth's email containing anecdotes of people's
experience interacting with him:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2537624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2537624)

------
acjohnson55
So I'm guessing he's not on Slack?

~~~
dave2000
Hard to tell; Slack doesn't let you know who's online, what they've read etc.

~~~
srcreigh
Slack lets you know who's online.

~~~
dave2000
You're right - I had to dig around to find it (on the Android app). It's
nowhere near as clear as it is in Facebook Messenger. (And of course there's
no `read to here`).

------
known
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw

~~~
guftagu
Wow! That looks like my new favorite quote

------
ubertaco
There is something that feels disingenuous about taking a conscientious
position against email, and then saying that you do actually use email, just
by way of a "human spam filter" instead of an automated one.

With that said, I certainly recognize the need for very-deep-focus jobs to be
uncoupled from the "right-now" pace expectations of email. So I think Knuth is
making a smart decision for the kind of work he does (and one that could be
useful to other people in similar lines of work), but he's just
presenting/explaining it poorly.

It's sorta like the person who proclaims "I don't have internet access, and
I'm better off for it", and then goes on to say that they have a personal
assistant whose job is to handle all their online
accounting/shopping/research/etc for them. Maybe they personally are better
off for their particular workflow, but the really _are_ using the internet,
just by proxy, and their implied value statement about themselves compared to
people who _do_ use the internet (directly) is not really valid.

~~~
pmelendez
He is very specific when he said that the only incoming email he welcome is
about bugs and errors in TAOCP. Also he doesn't rant against email, just
explained why is not for him and encourage people to use regular mail to
communicate with him.

------
Void_
Book "Deep Work" contains some great thoughts on this topic, talking about
Knuth too.

I made an app that shows you how often you check your email:
[http://focuslist.co/escape/](http://focuslist.co/escape/) (and other
distracting websites)

~~~
coolandsmartrr
Looks neat. I tried to download from the MAS, but I use the incompatible
10.10, and I don't want to upgrade my OS. Is there a way to download it
regardless?

------
f_
I've read this a long time ago and it seems to be still mostly true! A more
recent statement of Knuth about email is here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS8qwMna8_o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS8qwMna8_o)

------
GnarfGnarf
Knuth has a point. Although I use email and couldn't work without it, I think
we haven't yet realized email's insidious invasion of our world, and its
pernicious change of our work habits. Suddenly the Inbox has become a tyrant
dictating our daily schedule. Since when do others have priority over our time
and attention, expecting immediate replies to their intrusions?

Companies and organizations have not yet grasped the negative impact on
productivity that email has wrought. Like drinking from lead goblets in
another era, it's going to be a while before we get it. We need email, but it
needs to be put in its place.

------
stretchwithme
He was still on email. He just delegated the work to someone else. Sounds like
a good arrangement for someone with his level of contribution. I'd rather he
didn't spend his limited time reading his junk mail either.

------
akkartik
_The form ``email '' has been well established in England for several years,
so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of
course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the
Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different
reason.)"_

I sense there's a joke here. Did anyone get it?

~~~
lobster_johnson
It's not a joke -- email (or émail in French) means enamel or glaze in those
languages.

~~~
dghughes
Canada too at least the French parts but anywhere here you can buy spray cans
of émail in English is enamel.

------
peter303
Before everything was wired to the internet in the late 1980s, UNIX and bboard
message apps were as popular as email. You were either there to get the
message or it didnt matter. I see mobile message apps enjoy a resurgence in
the past decade.

------
chj
Knuth does read emails and reply them, the only difference from the rest of us
is that he may do it on print out of original emails, and usually in batch.

------
johan_larson
He's old, and he's notable enough that people put up with his eccentricities.

~~~
tamana
That statement works fine, perhaps even better, without "he's old".

------
iquant
The existing comments are already largely meaningless, so I'll add another
meta comment:

Is the use of "versus" in the headline correct in English? There isn't
anything adversarial going on here, it is just his email policy.

In other places "versus" even seems to be used as a synonym of "and".

~~~
gaur
> There isn't anything adversarial going on here

On the contrary, this passage sounds quite hostile:

> If I run across such a message that was misaddressed --- I mean, if the
> message asks a question instead of reporting an error --- I try not to get
> angry. I used to just throw all such sheets in the wastebasket. But now I
> save them for scratch paper, so that I can print test material for The Art
> of Computer Programming on the blank sides.

------
dang
Anybody know the year of this? It was posted in 2007
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81289))
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9997073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9997073)
has 2003 in the title, but it's likely even older. The delightful Eco quote
was from 1995.

~~~
0942v8653
Another date for you: there's an HTML comment in the <head>

    
    
        <!-- Changed by: Ursula N. Owen,  8-Mar-1999 -->
    

It's possible that it's referring to the HTML skeleton, not the article
itself.

~~~
dang
Bravo for finding a bit of actual textual evidence. Let's use 1999; it's at
least an upper bound.

~~~
j_koreth
Actually I heard of him stopping to use email during the late 80's and such

~~~
dang
That's consistent with cpr's post. But the article was clearly written later.

------
cmarschner
After catching dust for 15 years on my bookshelf, I sold the 3-volume edition
of The Art of Computer Programming this week through a used book service. No
regrets.

