Since we are OT, I got an hilarious laugh out of the last quote on the above linked page..

Steve Jobs greeted Knuth saying "It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth. I've read all of your books." Knuth responded "You're full of shit".

Steve Jobs greeted Knuth saying "It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth. I've read all of your books." Knuth responded "You're full of shit".

Knuth spoke at my brother-in-law's high school graduation, and I was in attendance. My mother in law heard me say that Mr. Knuth was a "big name" in computer science, and therefore decided to force an introduction (I was content with just seeing him speak - "basking in his presence", so to speak). Beet faced, after shaking his hand and a short, awkward silence, I stammered out "I like your books", which just added more hue to the color of my face ¹. Of course, "I like your books" is now somewhat of a family joke :)

1 - We did have a short exchange after that, but all I can remember of it is him telling me to "find my own niche". Still trying :).

--MidLifeXis

Sorry; which one? Try as I might, I cannot see a quotation on that page which is anything like the one I’m after. Am I overlooking something?

Makeshifts last the longest.

The second one

"... the psychological profiling of a programmer is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large." * Source: Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 16-22, April 1996.

Like I said, it wasn't exactly your words, but it indicates that it might be discussed in that article. Your paraphrased quote would flow nicely

""Don Knuth is said to have said something along the lines that every problem in software can be solved with either more or less abstraction, and that experience tells us which one is the way to go."

So I could see the next point of discussion in that article being about the "experience of the programmer" and him/her knowing which level of abstraction to go to.?

It might be worth checking out the article, I don't have a Dr. Dobbs subscription.

---

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

I have felt for a long time that a talent for programming consists largely of the ability to switch readily from microscopic to macroscopic views of things, i.e., to change levels of abstraction fluently ... Sometimes the "correct" order is top-down, sometimes it is bottom-up, and sometimes it's a mixture; but always it's an order that makes sense on expository grounds.

Not really :-/ – see my reply to hossman.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Maybe it's a misquotation and attribution of Every problem in computer science can be solved by adding another level of indirection" -- Butler Lampson ?

No, specifically not.

According to my research, that quotation goes back to Steven M. Bellovin, btw…

Makeshifts last the longest.

"knuth abstraction experience more less" turns up an old salon article on Knuth containing the following paragraph...

But programmers ignore "the very pulse of the machine" (a Wordsworth quotation found in Volume 1) at their peril. As Lyle Ramshaw, a former graduate student of Knuth's, points out, "Don claims that one of the skills that you need to be a computer scientist is the ability to work with multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. When you're working at one level, you try and ignore the details of what's happening at the lower levels. But when you're debugging a computer program and you get some mysterious error message, it could be a failure in any of the levels below you, so you can't afford to be too compartmentalized."

...it's not an exact quote from Knuth, but it seems to afirm that such a sentiment did/does exist.

Everyone pointed out this quote, but as I noted in reply to zentara, that sentiment is actually very different from the gist of the quote I am after. The gist of this quote is that being able to keep multiple abstraction in mind is the talent that makes one a programmer. The quote I am looking for asserts that when faced with a problem while building a system, one can solve it either by remove abstractions or by introducing new ones. These statements have little more than incidental overlap in that they both involve abstractions.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Donald Knuth Quotes.

That appears to be roughly identical to the page on Wikiquote and does not contain any leads other than the one every else has already pointed out. Is there anything specific you wanted to point out?

Makeshifts last the longest.