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Donald Knuth
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==Programming== ===Digital typesetting=== In the 1970s, the publishers of [[TAOCP]] abandoned [[Monotype System|Monotype]] in favor of [[phototypesetting]]. Knuth became so frustrated with the inability of the latter system to approach the quality of the previous volumes, which were typeset using the older system, that he took time out to work on digital typesetting and created [[TeX]] and [[Metafont]].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.kyotoprize.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/12kA_lct_EN.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180127194502/http://www.kyotoprize.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/12kA_lct_EN.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-date=2018-01-27 |title=Digital Typography (Kyoto Prize Lecture, 1996) |last=Knuth |first=Donald Erwin |year=1997 }}</ref> ===Literate programming=== While developing TeX, Knuth created a new methodology of programming, which he called [[literate programming]], because he believed that programmers should think of programs as works of literature: {{blockquote|Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf |title=Literate Programming |last=Knuth |first=Donald Erwin |year=1984 |access-date=2020-03-26 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190819211815/http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf |archive-date=2019-08-19 |url-status=dead }}</ref>}} Knuth embodied the idea of literate programming in the [[WEB]] system. The same WEB source is used to ''weave'' a TeX file, and to ''tangle'' a [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]] source file. These in their turn produce a readable description of the program and an executable binary respectively. A later iteration of the system, [[CWEB]], replaces Pascal with [[C (programming language)|C]], [[C++]], and [[Java (programming language)|Java]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html|title=Knuth and Levy: CWEB}}</ref> Knuth used WEB to program TeX and METAFONT, and published both programs as books, both originally published the same year: ''TeX: The Program'' (1986); and ''METAFONT: The Program'' (1986).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html |title=Knuth: Computers and Typesetting |website=www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu |access-date=2019-07-19 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190411233455/https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html |archive-date=2019-04-11 |date=2019-04-11 |url-status=dead |first=Donald |last=Knuth }}</ref> Around the same time, [[LaTeX]], the now-widely adopted macro package based on TeX, was first developed by [[Leslie Lamport]], who later published its first user manual in 1986.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lamport |first=Leslie |url=https://archive.org/details/latex00lesl |title=LATEX : a document preparation system |date=1986 |publisher=Addison-Wesley Pub. Co |isbn=020115790X |oclc=12550262 |url-access=registration}}</ref>
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