Note from Don Knuth – bug(s) in MetaPost? | Hacker News Reader

Note from Don Knuth – bug(s) in MetaPost?

tug.org

60 pointsalanpost15 comments

OK, so Dr. Knuth is alive and well, and reporting a bug. Is there more to this that I'm not seeing?

Yeah, not exactly sure this is newsworthy. He's not even reporting a bug, just responding to one.

Keep being alive Dr. Knuth.

MetaFont and TeX are both known for being bug-free because Knuth offered cash rewards for finding them—famously, he no longer does this because he had issues with people not cashing his checks. So it's highly unusual to find bugs, and is generally considered newsworthy these days.

EDIT: MetaPost -> MetaFont

I think you meant MetaFont.

> he no longer does this because he had issues with people not cashing his checks.

Slight correction - he had issues with people attacking his checking accounts: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

How does one yawn into the abyss knowing that Dr Knuth himself produced "MULTIPLE errors" in writing code to ... draw a dot.

MetaPost is not by Knuth, it is based on his own (presumably correct) code from Metafont.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaPost

He doesn't even have his own email anymore and has to borrow someone else's?

Dr. Knuth doesn't do email quite like you might expect.

"My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months."

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

"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."

So I think we all read that and think we want to be a bit more like Don Knuth, eh?

I've met Dr Knuth a couple of times. He's a lovely man, rather modest and just a little nervous. There are some in the industry I've met who know of their infamy and carry it less well.

Last time I spoke to Don, he was stood on a low/wide window ledge of Manchester (UK) Town Hall watching the Olympic flame make it's arrival there in the Spring of 2012.

We were both attending a conference held there in honour of Alan Turing's 100th birthday. Also in the room were Fred Brooks, Vint Cerf, Tony Hoare, Samuel Klein and various other amazing names from computer science and a few other names of note who aren't quite so "classic" yet (David Ferrucci of IBM Watson project, Gary Kasparov, etc.).

This is the first and last time I will ever name drop, and I swear I have no idea how I ended up in that room with that company. But it was pretty cool.

And Don did not fall out of the window, and I was relieved I did not witness same. That would have scarred me for life.

Anyway, he's got the right idea. We should all be more like Don.

Surely you mean "fame" and not "infamy".

Perhaps both words could be equally applicable in this respect. :-)

He is not merely "famous", he is "in-famous". ;)

> I ran this with newly installed MacTeX from the TeX Collection 2013.

Then this:

>Unfortunately the Ubuntu engine that converts PostScript to my

So Mr. Knuth's using a Macbook and Ubuntu at the same time.

Yup—he's spoken about it[1]:

> I currently use Ubuntu Linux, on a standalone laptop—it has no Internet connection. I occasionally carry flash memory drives between this machine and the Macs that I use for network surfing and graphics; but I trust my family jewels only to Linux. Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.

[1]: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

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