Knuth versus Email
Email (let's drop the hyphen)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer<br>had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems<br>to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top<br>of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.<br>What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.<br>I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try<br>to digest that knowledge into<br>a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over<br>the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people<br>who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is<br>to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every<br>six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use<br>good ol' snail mail and send a letter to the following address:
Prof. Donald E. Knuth
Computer Science Department
CoDa Building room W208
389 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5008 USA.
I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming postal mail and separates<br>out anything that she knows I've been looking forward to seeing urgently.<br>Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically.
My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to<br>taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu,<br>so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance. If I run<br>across such a message that was misaddressed --- I mean, if the message<br>asks a question instead of reporting an error --- I try not to get angry.<br>I used to just throw all such sheets in the wastebasket.<br>But now I save them for scratch paper, so that<br>I can print test material for The Art of Computer Programming on<br>the blank sides. I DO NOT ANSWER UNSOLICITED EMAILS, nor do I respond to<br>emails that were sent to my colleagues with a bothersome request for them to<br>communicate with me. Email is a no-no EXCEPT for reporting errors in books.
`I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main<br>purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker
Sometimes I do send email, through my secretary, with respect to the<br>project I'm currently working on, when I believe that the recipient<br>won't be bothered by my request. But I hope you can understand why I<br>am almost always unhappy to receive unsolicited email myself.<br>Thank you for your patience and cooperation as I try to finish<br>The Art of Computer Programming<br>(TAOCP),<br>a work that I began in 1962 and that I will need many years to complete.<br>In return, I promise not to send unwelcome email requests to you.
A note on email versus e-mail
Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the<br>hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people<br>used to write “non-zero” and “soft-ware” instead of “nonzero”<br>and “software”; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of<br>other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic<br>spelling “e-mail”. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in<br>your lifetime if you stop now! The form “email” has been well<br>established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see<br>Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course,<br>“email” has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands<br>much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)
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