Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
We all depend on and owe a lot to others. I think Donald Knuth more than satisfied his lifetime obligations to the rest of us a long time ago.
Are you even hinting that he has been slacking?
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No, I'm not. Donald Knuth is one of my all-time hero's, because he created TeX, along with Ritchie, Kernigan and Thompon (C, Unix, and, in case of Thompson, his work on chess computing).
I *am* hinting that he may have been overly ambitious. It's not possible for ONE man to write a series of books containing ALL collective knowledge regarding computer programming from the beginning.
In my opinion it's unrealistic to think that, at 76, you can write a volume 4B, 4C, 4D ("and others, if I need them"), volume 5, revise the first three volumes up to 21st century standards of computing, and then write 6 and 7, if the first three (and 4A) volumes took you 50 years to complete.
He's now only halfway through the work he set himself, so he would need another 50 years to complete it. Even if he does live another 50 years, becoming 126+, I don't see him writing computer books. It's a marvel that he still does, and CAN do it at his current age.
Long story short, he, and other writers, are not Elrond. They can plan and wish to do anything they want, but planning and starting projects at 70+ that take multiple decades to finish is just foolhardy.
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It's the same with Martin. Didn't he say that A Song of Ice and Fire would be 7 books? He now has 5 of them, the 6th hasn't appeared yet, and he customarily takes 5 or 6 years before submitting his first draft, or so I've read. He's 67, and in bad health it seems, so I think it's a somewhat legitimate concern of his fans that he might not finish the series, and they'll be left hanging after 20 years of reading.
I don't like it when an author starts a series without knowing where and when it will end; in this case, while I do have the first five books (I picked them up cheap, using Kobo codes), I'm a bit loth to start reading until he finishes it.
I have the same problem with The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, which also seems to go on and on and on. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan came to an abrupt end due to him dying and needed to be finished by Sanderson. I don't know if I will ever read The Sword of Truth or The Wheel of Time, as the reviews of the books in the middle of the series are not good.
Now, I'm reading that the third and fourth book of The Song of Ice and Fire are also much less than books 1, 2 and 5.
Raymond E. Feist seems to have become afraid or something, as he cut two books from the Riftwars Cycle, replacing it them with a novella, and suddenly ending the series with Magician's End. That was the point where I got all of the books (30), and I just hope they live up to the reviews.