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    Leaders in Computing: Changing the digital world
    Leaders in Computing: Changing the digital world
    Leaders in Computing: Changing the digital world
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    Leaders in Computing: Changing the digital world

    By Donald Knuth, Grady Booch, Linus Torvalds and

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    About this ebook

    This collection of exclusive interviews provides a fascinating insight into the thoughts and ideas of influential figures from the world of IT and computing, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Donald Knuth, Linus Torvalds, Jimmy Wales, Grady Booch, Steve Wozniak, Vint Cerf, Karen Spärck Jones and Dame Stephanie Shirley.

    With representatives from areas as diverse as programming, development, hardware, networks, interface, internet and applications, this collection also provides an excellent overview of important developments in this diverse field over recent years.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
    Release dateSep 30, 2011
    ISBN9781780171005
    Leaders in Computing: Changing the digital world

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      Book preview

      Leaders in Computing - BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

      CONTENTS

      FOREWORD

      GETTING TO SPEAK TO WELL-KNOWN FIGURES

      Like most journalists I suffer from PIT (pre-interview trepidation) – the people I have the privilege to interview are often at the top of their professions or disciplines, renowned, much-decorated, very very intelligent. Will they disappoint me, turning out to be pompous or overbearing? Or, worse, will they find me out – effortlessly exposing my limitations with one well-turned phrase or insight?

      I’m pleased to report that those we’ve interviewed over recent times, many of whom are at the leading edge of computer science are, to a person, thoroughly decent coves. And interesting.

      The likes of Linus Torvalds and Sir Tim Berners-Lee rarely speak to the media, so it’s great to get in front of them, if only for a brief time. With others, who perhaps I hadn’t heard of initially, like Grady Booch and Karen Spärck Jones, you find out fascinating things, get background on technologies we now take for granted and even enjoy the occasional laugh (check out Grady’s Quick questions).

      Others’ interviews here have been done by my colleagues and they too have fed back to me their fascination with their interviewee and commented on the sheer enthusiasm that genuine experts have. These range from the well-known names – Jimmy Wales, Steve Wozniak – to perhaps less widely known, but just as vital figures.

      The combination of the personal and technical insight that a good interview can provide is a heady and revealing one. Enjoy.

      Brian Runciman

      Publisher (Editorial)

      BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

      1 THE ART OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

      Donald Knuth, June 2011

      While he was over in the UK for a book tour and lecture series, Professor Donald Knuth, the author of the hugely respected The Art of Computer Programming book series, made time to talk to BCS editor Justin Richards about his life and works.

      You’re probably best known for your book series The Art of Computer Programming. In 1999, these books were named among the best 12 physical-science monographs of the century by American Scientist. How did these books originally come about and how do you feel about the American Scientist distinction?

      The books came about because, in the 60s, when I began, everyone was starting to rediscover things because there was no one good source of what was known and I had enjoyed writing all the time. I was involved in newspapers at school and magazines and thought of myself as a writer and I realised there was a need for someone to get down all the good ideas that had been published and that we were already forgetting.

      This was back in the earliest days, when the number of people actually studying computing was probably less than a thousand. I didn’t see it as affecting the world, but I still thought it was pretty cool stuff and ought to be organised.

      Then I thought about who else could write such a book and everyone I thought of I thought they’d probably only mention their own stuff and I was the only guy I knew who hadn’t invented anything himself, so I figured I could be neutral and I could be a spokesman for the other people. And really that was the original motivation.

      I started writing the book and, naturally, because I was trying to combine the ideas of many different people, I would see where one person had analysed his method in one way while another, for a competing method, had analysed it another way. So I had to analyse method A according to author B and method B according to author A.

      Therefore I ended up creating an original work just by analysing these things and pretty soon I realised there were a whole bunch of interesting scientific approaches here that hadn’t been part of my own education that were really coming together. Over and over again I was really seeing this way of thinking as necessary in order to get the story right.

      So, to make a long story short, pretty soon I had my own axe to grind too; I started discovering things too and I couldn’t be an unbiased writer anymore.

      However, I still kept to the original idea of trying to summarise everybody’s ideas in the fairest, most reasonable way I could.

      Now, to be put into that category of one of the best books of the century, that’s a little bit embarrassing as they rank me with Einstein and Feynman. I’m not in that league really, I just didn’t have as much competition. They had to have a token person in computer science! But still, I worked hard and I think it was necessary to comment on the research so far, but it’s a bit like comparing apples to oranges when they chose me to represent computing.

      What is it about computer science that drew you to it?

      I was born to be a computer scientist – I have a way of organising stuff in my head that just seems to make me a good programmer. I think everybody can learn to use computers, but only about 1 person in every 50 is a geek in the same way as I am. That means we can push the envelope and can resonate with the computer. The way we think helps to make it easier for us to know how to construct a machine.

      Why do you think computer science is so important?

      Computer scientists are important because of the way they affect communication and, I’m sorry to say it, also finances. Unfortunately, the world measures what my colleagues and I do by how much our work affects Wall Street. I’m jealous of astronomers, for example, because people respect astronomers for doing astronomy because it’s interesting just for its own sake. I studied computer science because it’s interesting to study computer science.

      The term IT doesn’t resonate with me so much – it’s the science that interests me. To me the IT is very nice, but it’s not something that I’m particularly good at. My wife can figure out what these icons mean and what to click before I can, but there are so many scientific challenges in order to get machines to do complicated, sophisticated things. The ideas are subtle, the questions are fascinating. There are many questions I never thought I’d know the answer to, but gradually we’ve learned how to solve them. For me I would do it even if there was no money in it.

      So you have a passion for it?

      Yeah, it’s like I wake up in the morning thinking I’ve got to write a program.

      Do you have a muse?

      Yeah, well some days she talks to me more than others. There was a period when I almost thought there was a muse dictating to me.

      In your opinion, what do you think is your greatest achievement in the field of computer sciences?

      I guess the first thing I did well at was when I worked on the theory that goes on behind how compilers work. I worked on the theory that underlies algebraic languages, and, as I was writing The Art of Computing book (Chapter 10), I was describing what everyone else had done, but then I realised that there was a way to bring these things together. I didn’t know how to explain that in a book, it was too far out, so I published that theory in a paper and other people figured out what I meant and this became the theory of parsing that’s used in all algebraic compilers now.

      But I feel the biggest thing that I developed was the mathematical approach to compare algorithms in order to find out how good a method was. I worked out quantitative ways you could say that one program is going to be, say, 2.3 times better than another one and the mathematics that goes with it and it’s called the analysis of algorithms. It’s what I’m most proud of – in developing an academic subject – but it’s key to the successful use of the machine.

      When I came up with this approach, I said to my publishers ‘let’s rename the book and call it The Analysis of Algorithms’ and they said ‘we can’t, it will never sell!’ But that’s really what my book is about – it summarises the work of all these people, but it also helps us decide, in a quantitative manner, how good each method is.

      You’ve said on your website, in response to the question ‘why don’t you do email?’ – ‘Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.’ Can you explain your stance on email and what you meant about being on the bottom of things?

      Someone has not to be tweeting all the time, someone has to be thinking about things which need a long attention span and trying to

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