An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of visualization in understanding algorithms.
Donald Knuth's quote highlights that algorithms are often complex and abstract concepts that can be difficult to grasp without visual representation. He suggests that seeing the workings of an algorithm, perhaps through diagrams or visualizations, makes it easier for people to understand and appreciate the underlying processes involved.
In practice
During a tech presentation, I used Knuth's quote to highlight the importance of diagrams in explaining complex algorithms.
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!
Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
A design is intuitive when people just know what to do and they donβt have to go through any training to get there When a design is not intuitive, our attention moves away from what weβre trying to accomplish to how we can get the interface to accomplish what we want.
You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.
I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.
The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
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