Computer Programming as an Art

“It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.”

From Donald Knuth's 1974 ACM Turing Award Lecture, Computer Programming as an Art . More recommended reading at Babar K Zafar's Classic Texts in Computer Science .

via Tom Cardens post on Computing for Emergent Architecture

Add comment February 18th, 2006