Computer programming as an art

  • Authors:
  • Donald E. Knuth

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1974

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Abstract

When Communications of the ACM began publication in 1959, the members of ACM's Editorial Board made the following remark as they described the purposes of ACM's periodicals [2]: “If computer programming is to become an important part of computer research and development, a transition of programming from an art to a disciplined science must be effected.” Such a goal has been a continually recurring theme during the ensuing years; for example, we read in 1970 of the “first steps toward transforming the art of programming into a science” [26]. Meanwhile we have actually succeeded in making our discipline a science, and in a remarkably simple way: merely by deciding to call it “computer science.”