The Tears of Donald Knuth – Communications of the ACM

Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. In this column I will be looking at the changing relationship between the discipline of computer science and the growing body of scholarly work on the history of computing, beginning with a recent plea made by renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth. This provides an opportunity to point you toward some interesting recent work on the history of computer science and to think more broadly about what the history of computing is, who is writing it, and for whom they are writing. Last year historians of computing heard an odd rumor: that Knuth had given the Kailath lecture at Stanford University and spent the whole time talking about us. Its title, “Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science,” was certainly intriguing, and its abstract confirmed that some forceful positions were being taken.a The onlin

Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. In this column I will be looking at the changing relationship between the discipline of computer science and the growing body of scholarly work on the history of computing, beginning with a recent plea made by renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth. This provides an opportunity to point you toward some interesting recent work on the history of computer science and to think more broadly about what the history of c