You are one of the fathers of the open-source revolution, even if you aren’t widely heralded as such. You previously have stated that you released TeX as open source because of the problem of proprietary implementations at the time, and to invite corrections to the code—both of which are key drivers for open-source projects today. Have you been surprised by the success of open source since that time? Donald Knuth: The success of open source code is perhaps the only thing in the computer field that hasn’t surprised me during the past several decades. But it still hasn’t reached its full potential; I believe that open-source programs will begin to be completely dominant as the economy moves more and more from products towards services, and as more and more volunteers arise to improve the code.

interesting as always

Regarding The Art of Computer Programming, it’s such a fascinating project. As I was researching I realized that you started it before either of my parents were even born. When you’re considering a project of that scope, how do you go about outlining and organizing and planning?

Well the best thing is to be a very bad estimator of how much time it’s going to take. At one point I thought I would have it done before my son was born; he was born in 1965. If I had known how much work it was going to be, I would have been pretty stupid to have started because here we are almost 60 years later and I’m basically a little more than half done.

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