

The Best Program according to Don Knuth - rams
http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2005/10/best-program-according-to-don-knuth.html

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serhei
I've given up on waiting for the MacPaint source code.

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ars
Best why?

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mechanical_fish
You'd have to ask Knuth why _he_ thinks so. He may have seen the source code,
for example.

Speaking merely as a user who remembers when the Mac was first introduced:
Because it was a program which you could play with for sixty seconds and
immediately get a vision -- not only of exactly what the Mac was all about,
but of what the next few decades in computing were going to look like. It's
hard to describe the intensity of the experience of seeing it for the first
time. I still have the issue of _Popular Science_ in which I first saw a photo
of the interface.

Sure, in a sense it was nothing that Engelbart and the PARC guys hadn't done
before. But it was no research project; it was a _shipping consumer product_
with a solid, elegant, friendly, minimalist design, built (according to
Wikipedia) in 8500 lines of source code, that ran crisply on a PC which cost
far less than the $10k Apple Lisa, to say nothing of a $100k piece of custom
Xerox research hardware.

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byrneseyeview
With all these fragmentary, unsourced anecdotes about Donald Knuth, one would
think he hadn't given numerous interviews and written several actual books.

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rams
unsourced ? It's right here:
<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/001.html> and linked from the
post as well. And it's Andy Hertzfeld one of the original Mac developers who
related this incident. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld>)

What's wrong per se with anecdotes ? It's a great part of the craftsman
tradition.

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ideamonk
whose favorite program is ms paint ?

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agentbleu
what ever happened to Nerd tv. Shut down after 1 series? crazy...

