Rumours and Errours
Brian Hayes · American Scientist · 2005
tion to them. An inspiring exception is Donald e. Knuth of Stanford University. During a decade's labor on the TeX typesetting system, he kept a meticulous log of all his errors, and then he pub lished the list with a detailed commentary. I have long admired Knuth's act of public bravery, and this column is my attempt to follow his example. I took courage from the thought that if there is any realm of life in which I might hope to surpass Don Knuth, it's in making mistakes; but, alas, I've fallen short even in this dubious department. Knuth's published error log runs to more than 900 entries, whereas here I am going to confess to only a paltry handful of mistakes. Then again, Knuth needed 10 years' work on a major software project to accumulate his budget of errors, but I was able to commit some really serious howlers in a program of a dozen lines. Knuth remarks that keeping an error log not only in debugging the program but also helped me to get to know myself. I would like to think that I too have acquired some self knowledge from the experience of confronting my own fallibility. And it would be gratifying to suggest that by telling my story I might save oth ers from making the same mistakes?but I don't quite believe that, and I'm not even sure it would be a good idea.