Yak Shaves is a small personal blog about programming culture and open source, best known for a post on Donald Knuth.
HN commenters repeatedly link its post on Knuth as the patron saint of yak shaves, one calling it a favorite web page.
Whenever somebody says something, one has to consider their Competency, Context and Time to read between the lines and try and get at the gist of what is being intended rather then the mere words themselves.
This is orders of magnitude more important when we try to understand "The Greats" (in any field) because they have a certain insight into things, a huge knowledge base to draw upon and are aware of myriads of nuances involved in their domain of expertise all of which we poor students have to struggle to grasp.
It is with the above points in mind that one should interpret Knuth's nuanced quote above. He had the highest of regards/respect for Dijkstra (see his detailed review (pdf) of Dijkstra's book "Structured Programming" at http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/73/371/CS-TR-73-371.pdf) Given that Donald Knuth is the "Patron Saint of Yak Shaves" (https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/) his perspective did not allow a fully mathematical abstraction without any reference to a machine (real or virtual). Note that he did not deny Dijkstra's approach but merely wasn't agreeing with Dijkstra's strident promotion of it. That is a viewpoint and not a value judgement.
Coming back to the points above;
[1-3] - One has to remember that when Dijkstra did these almost nothing that we take for granted today existed. Everything had to be built from ground-up. You can imagine the difficulty when you have nothing/nobody to learn from and are basically…
> TeX was also built for TAOCP. Crazy stuff.
If you haven't yet, read "Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves" at https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
For TAOCP Knuth also creates a new assembly language, for illustration purposes.
TeX was written in WEB, a programming language Knuth made which transpiles to Pascal.
It's based on literate programming, a programming paradigm Knuth introduced.
And Knuth developed his own font, for use by TeX, along with a system to make fonts.
Crazy stuff indeed!
Do note[1] that TeX itself was written as a result of Knuth being unsatisfied with the typesetting of his newly written volume 2 of TAoCP. I don’t know if Lamport encountered the same yak with LaTeX, but I do know he’s a distributed systems researcher, not a programmer in a relevant area :)
[1] https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
Donald Knuth seems to have got it right. On the way to writing a book, he wrote all the tooling including a typesetting system, a programming paradigm, a font, a font authoring tool, and so on.
https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
Thanks for adding some sober reality.
And now for perhaps my favorite web page on the Internet: https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/