I have not looked at METAFONT. I really wanna design a font with it one day. It was the first font creation software I hear.

Truly, truly literate text! :D

It’s name of the paper. You can google-scholar it or just google-normal it with ext:pdf to gain access to it. It’s a very nice paper!

Just remember that back when Knuth wrote this, there was no such thing as ‘scripting’. So if you don’t necessarily ‘program’ but ‘script’ a lot, that’s the same. With scripting, the cleverness is not in algorithms you use or stuff like that, it’s as you said, clever use of resources. I have a story to tell:

A few hours ago my brother showed me this guy on Twitter telling people that, he’s asked people to ‘partition an array of numbers and null on null’ (in JS) and he showed his original solution, which was an iterative solution, very non-functional in style, and I kinda don’t like code that is just “too” imperative you know? Then my brother showed me someone’s solution.

const arr = [21, 242, 1135, null, 1341, null, 2424, 11, 22, 444 ];
// solution
arr.join(',').split(',,').map(subarray => subarray.split(','))

Golfing like this is exactly what would make Knuth cry! I wish people understood that golfing is not very readable! But understanding why this happens is what makes you more endearing, to me at least! This happens because of Javascript’s orthogonality, a remnant of Smalltalk-80 being retrofitted into a prototype-based system! Also, this is because ECMA-262 has specified ‘join’ to ignore ‘null’. Because ‘null’ is not a prototype, it’s baked into the grammar! It has no way to respond to ‘join’ so it gets left out! This is because of how Smalltalk-80-based languages are just “always communicating”. “null” is part of grammar, it does not communicate, so it gets left out.

Now, knowing that, this code looks more beautiful right?

Yeah, such tripe!

Cool, but where’s the accreditation? At least Coursera has a bit of accreditation. Accreditation is very important. I quit my last college after 3 semesters because it was basically a meme college. It was very close to our home though. I’m going back after 5 years, not to the meme college, but to a much more accredited college. The special thing about this college is that it’s a state college (‘state’ referring to the country, I am not from US), and it’s got good rankings (+1000 but I never aimed for much!) but it’s very, very cheap because for non-lab classes, it’s basically “here’s a bunch of books, study them, and come back for tests”! I know this ‘seems’ like a meme college, but it’s truly not. It’s very accredited. That is why OP’s course might just help me. I have been studying like mad for the past 3 months. So I starred this. All this being said can e summed up in a single ‘thank you’. And an advice to others, go [back] to college. It’s the only way to get a job these days. The days of “self-taught wiz-kid” are over. Don’t worry if you are in your mid-20s, or early-30s like I am. Or even mid-30s or even if you are at death’s door. College is great.