Quote by Knuth

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 4:52 PM
> From: "Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor" 
> <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Quote by Knuth
>
> Christopher Dimech wrote:
>
> > Thousands of other people have a doctorate in mathematics
> > apart from Knuth
>
> Hahaha :)
>
> > But I have read Knuth's papers and understand exactly his
> > position on what is literate programming. He mas not
> > combining "writing for humans" ("literature") and "writing
> > for machines" (programming). He wanted programming to be
> > like literature. Thusly I am in disagreement with him.
>
> But isn't that the same thing, isn't literature "writing for
> humans"? Well, it isn't programming anyway, try compiling
> "Collected Short Stories" by Ivan Tolstoyevksy and see what
> happens ... yeah, DNC ... but I've heard some HUMANS read it
> and thought it was good! (Maybe some of them just pretended to
> have read all 14 volumes.)

I exclude writings that are primarily informative-technical, scholarly,
journalistic - from the rank of literature.

> > Without Knuth others would have delved into the analysis of
> > algorithms. Mostly it is about the development of tex
> > everybody gets fired about. Without tex, few would have
> > heard of him. Still, mathematical typesetting already
> > existed before Knuth. In actual fact, he got all his ideas
> > from the typesetting that already existed. In "Mathematical
> > Typography," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
> > March 1979, Vol. 1, No. 2, 337-72; he stated that his
> > typesetting ideas originated from the Transactions of the
> > American Mathematical Society, which began publication in
> > 1900; and some other journal (a dutch one if I remember).
>
> Yeah, but regardless of whatever, science and all human
> progress works like that ... and that's a good thing.

Yes.  But that was a criticism when someone said that one can never
overestimate knuth.

> > And, let us not deny it, with a lot of help from Guy Steele.
>
> It is a GOOD thing he got help from other talented people!
>
> > TeX has got people to focus on pretty printing, which is
> > what typesetting is mainly about. But structural and
> > semantic info are receiving greater and greater awareness as
> > opposed to formatting or displaying aspects. LaTeX mended
> > some of the problems with TeX by turning a pretty printing
> > system into a structured documentation system.
>
> Again,
>
> 1. That's the purpose of the tool (and not _just_ "pretty" as
>    you say, also useful, indispensable stuff like math
>    notation, formulaes, diagrams, indexes, footnotes,
>    hyperlinks, captions, tables ...) When ideas are
>    compilicated this help A LOT to convey them, also PRODUCING
>    such material help the people who are active with it in
>    their creative/thought process.
>
> 2. Not all people should be the same, that would be horrible
>    and a totally defuct world/race! Some people care about
>    this stuff and that's good for them, YOU should be active
>    in the fields that YOU care about, Stop waste time on
>    negativism and get into the game yourself.

It is like what is happening with coronavirus.  Don't be negative
and worry about coronavirus, governments have told us.  Now the idiotic
minister is in hospital after contracting coronavirus even though he is
fully vaccinated.

https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/minister-michael-farrugia-hospitalised.888037

> PS. Some pretty good looking LaTeX if I may :)
>       https://dataswamp.org/~incal/borta/borta.pdf - LITERATURE!
>       https://dataswamp.org/~incal/hs-linux/docs/report/report.pdf

Got no problem with that.  In my field, recording concepts in mathematics,
requires its own writing system in the form of mathematical notation.

And many people don't like it because it is distinct from natural languages
in that it aims to communicate certain ideas with more precision and less
ambiguity.

>     - also FOR HUMANS but contains SOURCE - oh, my! what does
>     that mean? I'm not a girl but is it GOOD or BAD? it is so
>     hard to know! and if it stinks and didn't get a single
>     citation which would BTW put in in the top echelon of the
>     military-scholarly-publicistic complex - all acording to
>     our man on the field covering the university world,
>     Mr. Dimech - how do you check that BTW, the number of
>     citations? - anyway if it stink is it beacuse I spent too
>     much time on LaTeX [2] and forgor about the actual task?

If you are in an unfamiliar territory, you need a guru.

To check the citations, you take a journal (or a number of them),
and take the references.  Next you compile a counting system
of how many times a paper is included in the reference list.  You
can apply different criteria for categorisation.  You can find a number
of studies like this

Several library databases and other resources can be used to find how many
times a particular article has been cited and to also find a list of the
documents that have cited the article.


> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Querulant
> [2] https://dataswamp.org/~incal/hs-linux/docs/report/report.tex
>
> --
> underground experts united
> https://dataswamp.org/~incal
>
>
>