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.
Interpretation
Programming is a blend of science and art, akin to poetry and music creation.
Donald Knuth emphasizes that programming is not just a technical task but also a creative pursuit. It combines economic efficiency and scientific rigor with an aesthetic aspect that mirrors artistic disciplines like poetry and music, suggesting that the beauty of programming lies in its intellectual challenge and creative expression.
In practice
In a tech conference speech about the beauty of coding.
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.
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
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!
Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control
You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
The fear isn't that big data discriminates. We already know that it does. It's that you don't know if you've been discriminated against.
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