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by yiyus 3012 days ago
I totally agree Knuth is a genius, but he does not look like an early adopter at all. He does not use email and I would not be surprised if he does not have a mobile phone (not even a non-smart one).

I think that if I had seen him typing google.com in the yahoo search bar, I'd have just thought: of course.

1 comments

That's an interesting take. I never thought that he didn't use email because he was behind the times. I thought he used email for a period and then gave it up in 1995 (or something ridiculously early) like that because he was so ahead of the curve he could see where it was going and didn't want to waste his time.
Actually, you are right. This is the exact quote:

> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

My point was that he does not really care. I'm sure he still follows very closely some advancements, but he is not the kind of people I expect to be very informed about the new IDE, Javascript framework or web standard, for example. He is happy programming in a chalkboard.