Donald Knuth

My goal is to make complex ideas accessible to a wider audience.

The most important thing in a programming language is that it be simple and easy to understand.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

A computer program is a work of literature.

I find that I can't understand a program unless I can explain it to myself in English.

If you don't understand a program, you can't debug it.

I have often found that the best way to make a program faster is to make it smaller.

The purpose of a programming language is to help people think.

I'm not a computer scientist, I'm a mathematician who happens to work with computers.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

My main goal in life is to be able to understand things.

The best programs are those that are written for people to read, not just for computers to execute.

I believe that the best way to teach programming is to teach people how to think.

I have found that the most effective way to solve a problem is to break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

The greatest joy in programming is to see your code work correctly.

The most important thing in life is to be kind to others.

I believe that the future of computing lies in making computers more human-friendly.

The art of computer programming is the art of writing programs that are both efficient and elegant.

I have always been fascinated by the beauty of mathematics.

The most important thing in research is to ask the right questions.