Donald E. Knuth

At one point, I wrote C++ code using CWEB. The experience (which I found rather positive) convinced me that almost no other developer I knew would find it positive. (The approach of writing discursive text and code in parallel, although highly conducive to good code, is also extremely demanding.)

This collection of papers, centred on WEB and on related issues -- the article on "The Errors of TeX" should be required reading in any CS course of study -- remains both enlightening and relevant thirty-plus years on, although the overall approaches of most software practitioners (IDEs, automated refactoring tools, etc.) make the application of the disciplines described less likely than ever.… (mehr)

This latest volume has the cloth cover and sewn binding of the other volumes, which is nice in this day and age of shoddy bookmaking workmanship. A few pages in my copy seem to have gotten too much ink, but I guess that's the price you pay to have a book printed using real ink rather than toner.

The "Mathematical Preliminaries Redux" section talks about countable probability spaces but then talks about nontrivial random processes (of infinite length) that are apparently supported on such spaces. In the standard formulation, such a process would be a function with an uncountable range but a countable domain, which I find puzzling. I passed my concerns on to Dr. Knuth, but I wasn't able to convince him that there was an issue. It was an honor to get a hand-written reply from an icon anyway.

At the time of this book's release, Dr. Knuth is 84 and has plans for writing Volumes 5, 6, and 7. May it be!… (mehr)