To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!
Interpretation
This quote critiques the stagnation in hardware design and the shifting responsibility for performance improvement onto software developers.
Donald Knuth's quote reflects his concern that hardware designers have become uninspired in their innovations, leading to a reliance on software optimization to achieve performance gains. He suggests that rather than blaming software for limitations, the industry should focus on genuine advancements in hardware design to uphold Moore's Law, which posits that the number of transistors on a chip doubles approximately every two years, driving exponential growth in computing power.
In practice
In a tech conference while discussing the future of computing.
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.
An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn't humane.
People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best
Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
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