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Interview with Donald Knuth (InformIT)Interview with Donald Knuth (InformIT)Posted Apr 27, 2008 18:02 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)In reply to: Interview with Donald Knuth (InformIT) by jordanb Parent article: Interview with Donald Knuth (InformIT)
The same ideas in web are also in "document in the source" systems like doxygen. Sure, Knuth is of the "write it all by myself" people, and so he has no use for "resusable code". It is somewhat surprising that he thinks so highly of open source in this light. But academia is open source in a way (publish to get your ideas reviewed/corrected/built upon by others), so...
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Interview with Donald Knuth (InformIT) Posted Apr 28, 2008 8:07 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] Sure, Knuth is of the "write it all by myself" people, and so he has no use for "resusable code". It is somewhat surprising that he thinks so highly of open source in this light. If you read the fine article, he says he prefers "re-editable code" to "reusable code". From that point of view, open source makes perfect sense. If all you want is reusable code, you can link against a proprietary library, pay whatever licence fees are required, swallow their bugs. You don't need open source.
Interview with Donald Knuth (InformIT) Posted Apr 28, 2008 17:31 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] There is a difference between reuseable and editable. Reuseable code has to be so thoroughly documented that you never need to look inside it to know exactly what happens under corner cases. I have run into this problem so often that I feel, like Knuth, that editable source is better. Perl's LWP is a great example. I love it, it usually does just what I want, but then there are conditions where I don't know what it does, and I have to inspect the source or poke around in the debugger to find out exactly what is going on. If it were closed, I would be stuck. If it were proprietary but with source available, like Microsoft's useless "shared source", I would still be stuck if it didn't do the right thing or had a bug.
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