The Inspiration for Computer Programming

I recently had the privilege of attending one of Dr. Donald Knuth’s rare talks at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Dr. Knuth is an institution in himself. An emeritus professor at Stanford University, he has been teaching since 1968 and has written, taught and invented many fundamentals of computer science. These achievements come from his lifetime of interest and dedication to mathematics and computing.

At Mountain View, Dr. Knuth presented his passion for the history of programming languages. Discovering the history of a subject helps us not only to understand how important ideas are born but also to appreciate the amount of progress thereafter. The history of programming languages is striking because basic concepts that we now regard as self-evident were by no means a priori; hard work by a generation of brilliant and dedicated people was necessary to learn these basic principles. Dr Knuth’s new book, “Selected Papers on Computer Languages” highlights the progression of computing through the decades.

He showed how a particular procedure called the “TPK algorithm” might have been coded in the many languages starting from Konrad Zuse’s Plankalkül in 1945 to ALGOL in the early 60s. He noted the limitations of the hardware and the languages and the pseudo-compilers that were not in the least bit similar to what a compiler is today. It was astounding to see the evolution of computing within these past few decades, and Dr. Knuth has been an integral part of it. In a demonstration of careful historical preservation, Dr. Knuth used his own treasured handwritten slides from the 1970s. Dr. Knuth is the extraordinary embodiment of “living by example”, representing the combination of theory and practice to reach the zenith of success. It is contributions to computing by people like him, which has made Open Source software, which deeply depends on his foundation of algorithms and ideas, a robust and serious long-term solution for creating computing resources, IP and wealth in every part of the world.

Dr. Knuth also took aim at software patents and argued that computing research and long term inventions have no place for software patents.

Software has to be open in order for ideas to be shared and work to be done. He compared the patenting of software to patenting words in a natural language. Such an encumbered language would cease to exist in any reasonable form since no sentence would be possible. Nothing could have been done in programming language development and compilers if Unix, and today Linux, had not existed as open platforms. He would not have been able to invent, use and share his great typesetting system TeX without free and open access to software tools. He clarified that he was not against the concept of Intellectual Property but that software patents in particular inhibit free thinking, research and computing at large. And to sustain the revolution in computing, patents should not exist. Quoting Dr. Knuth, “Software has to be as free as ideas.”