Donald Knuth: [Split from] Getting the Ball Rolling
Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2011 1:29 pm
Ok, this is an opening I cannot resist 
Minor diversion ahead...
At the time I was interested in typography and undertook the challenge of porting the Pascal version of MetaFont to the Berkeley Unix available on Digital VAX systems widely used at schools.
Prof. Knuth, as time progressed, was looking for ways to encourage outside review of the code to eliminate as many bugs as possible. Once he passed a point in time where he was beginning to be confident about the code (I think it was version 0.9), he started offering an incentive. Each bug found at that revision would earn the reporter a personal check from him for $0.01.
The next version of the code would come out, and the bounty increased to $0.02 for version 0.99. And successive versions kept increasing the bounty by a power of two.
I found many more bugs in the BSD Pascal compiler than ever in MetaFont, but the day came and I was shocked to find a remaining bug in the MetaFont code (they were getting pretty rare by then). I sent it in and was rewarded with a check from Prof. Knuth for $10.24. Somewhere I hope I still have the photocopy of that check; in grad school $10.24 was far too much money to leave unspent!
_R
Minor diversion ahead...
Back in the distant past of my grad school years, Professor Knuth was still developing his typesetting tools TeX and MetaFont. He originally developed them for the Tops-10 operating system and had decided to rewrite them in Pascal to be available to a wider audience.Marten wrote:I hope that we can also agree that none of us are perfect, that unless one of us is Donald Knuth that none of us write perfect code.
At the time I was interested in typography and undertook the challenge of porting the Pascal version of MetaFont to the Berkeley Unix available on Digital VAX systems widely used at schools.
Prof. Knuth, as time progressed, was looking for ways to encourage outside review of the code to eliminate as many bugs as possible. Once he passed a point in time where he was beginning to be confident about the code (I think it was version 0.9), he started offering an incentive. Each bug found at that revision would earn the reporter a personal check from him for $0.01.
The next version of the code would come out, and the bounty increased to $0.02 for version 0.99. And successive versions kept increasing the bounty by a power of two.
I found many more bugs in the BSD Pascal compiler than ever in MetaFont, but the day came and I was shocked to find a remaining bug in the MetaFont code (they were getting pretty rare by then). I sent it in and was rewarded with a check from Prof. Knuth for $10.24. Somewhere I hope I still have the photocopy of that check; in grad school $10.24 was far too much money to leave unspent!
_R
