Love at First Byte
Stanford Magazine has a fascinating article on Donald Knuth, author of the highly respected reference The Art of Computer Programming.
Knuth was one of the first people to pronounce computer programming an art, believing that even the programs that crunch your taxes and produce your bank statements should be elegant. Like artists, he says, programmers have individual style and are propelled by intuitive leaps—Knuth knows he’s not really ready to solve a problem until he can think of it without using pencil and paper; his best ideas rise up from his subconscious while he swims. And like artists, he says, computer scientists are driven to produce. “Like a poet has to write poetry, I wake up in the morning and I have to write a computer program,†he says.
