Everyday Life Is Like Programming,

These Machines Have No Common Sense; They Have Not Yet Learned To "think," And They Do Exactly As They Are Told, No More And No Less. This Fact Is The Hardest Concept To Grasp When One First Tries To Use A Computer.

Always Remember, However, That There’s Usually A Simpler And Better Way To Do Something Than The First Way That Pops Into Your Head.

For His Major Contributions To The Analysis Of Algorithms And The Design Of Programming Languages, And In Particular For His Contributions To The "art Of Computer Programming" Through His Well-known Books In A Continuous Series By This Title.

Programmers Waste Enormous Amounts Of Time Thinking About, Or Worrying About, The Speed Of Noncritical Parts Of Their Programs, And These Attempts At Efficiency Actually Have A Strong Negative Impact When Debugging And Maintenance Are Considered. We Should Forget About Small Efficiencies, Say About 97% Of The Time: Premature Optimization Is The Root Of All Evil. Yet We Should Not Pass Up Our Opportunities In That Critical 3%.

... The Designer Of A New System Must Not Only Be The Implementor And The First Large-scale User; The Designer Should Also Write The First User Manual. ... If I Had Not Participated Fully In All These Activities, Literally Hundreds Of Improvements Would Never Have Been Made, Because I Would Never Have Thought Of Them Or Perceived Why They Were Important.