My First Program Taught Me A Lot

People Who Are More Than Casually Interested In Computers Should Have At Least Some Idea Of What The Underlying Hardware Is Like. Otherwise The Programs They Write Will Be Pretty Weird.

I Try To Learn Certain Areas Of Computer Science Exhaustively; Then I Try To Digest That Knowledge Into A Form That Is Accessible To People Who Don't Have Time For Such Study.

In Fact, My Main Conclusion After Spending Ten Years Of My Life Working On The Tex Project Is That Software Is Hard. It's Harder Than Anything Else I've Ever Had To Do.

The Book Dynamic Programming By Richard Bellman Is An Important, Pioneering Work In Which A Group Of Problems Is Collected Together At The End Of Some Chapters Under The Heading "exercises And Research Problems," With Extremely Trivial Questions Appearing In The Midst Of Deep, Unsolved Problems. It Is Rumored That Someone Once Asked Dr. Bellman How To Tell The Exercises Apart From The Research Problems, And He Replied: "if You Can Solve It, It Is An Exercise; Otherwise It's A Research Problem."

Computers Are Good At Following Instructions, But Not At Reading Your Mind.