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Old 9th November 2008
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Oko Oko is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ephemera View Post
the man is known as the father of computer science and his intellect/achievements exceeds that of all of us combined. do you really think he would "waste" 10 years of his life creating TeX without a compelling reason for doing so?
Well depends on you point of view. The people who were deprived from the
third volume of the Art of the Computer Science for almost two decades would cold -heartedly agree with me. I would go with Dr. J healthy speculation. Troff was closed and there were no real alternatives at the time for typesetting while the old gold standards were scraped by publishers due to the cost.

I agree that Knuth is the Leonard Euler of CS. However do not let the greatness cloud your mind. Great people also make blunders. The famous one in Computer Science is one committed by John von Neumann by putting a single clock in the heart of the computer despite fierce opposition of the chief co-architect
Dr. Lehman from U.C. Berkley (Just like Dr. J) who wanted to put couple clocks and run programs in parallel fashion. That effectively hindered the development of parallel programming for half a century.

I could not get of the impression that Knuth has gotten himself little bit too much into calligraphy. The fact that he brought Brian Ried inventor of the third major type setting system of the time Scribe to Stanford is the one of my arguments. It is important however to notice that typesetting systems that we are talking for granted today have been painfully developed by some of the brightest minds of computer science.


Cheers,
OKO

P.S. For Moderators.

I apologize to BSD666fun and everybody else as I had no intention of hijacking original thread. It seems to me that one of my original remarks mentioned in respond to the question to PCC compiler lead to this very interesting discussion TeX vs Troff. Could you pelase separate the thread.

Last edited by Oko; 9th November 2008 at 07:23 PM.
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