Knuth versus Email (1999)

Re:Knuth versus Email (1999) by Fiveplus on Thursday August 27, 2020 @07:02AM (#24292375)

Having refuted the central point of this entire essay, why do you think he wrote this in the first place?

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Re:Knuth versus Email (1999) by aberseti on Thursday August 27, 2020 @07:34AM (#24292599)

Like most people who say they're going to quit something he probably just started using it again when he realised it was useful and maybe even essential, and didn't bother to update this webpage. It's been 30 years after all.

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Re:Knuth versus Email (1999) by formerly_proven on Thursday August 27, 2020 @07:37AM (#24292620)

> Changed by: Ursula N. Owen, 8-Mar-1999

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Re:Knuth versus Email (1999) by bshimmin on Thursday August 27, 2020 @08:08AM (#24292830)

I was curious about this “Ursula N. Owen”, thinking perhaps she was an assistant of Knuth’s back in the 90s. It turns out that it’s a pseudonym sometimes used by Knuth himself, and is a reference to “U.N. Owen”, a character from And Then There Were None, a best-selling Agatha Christie novel first published in 1939 and one of the best-selling books of all time. The name “UN Owen” itself is a play on “unknown”, and I like to think of Donald chuckling to himself whenever he used that pseudonym.

From the postscript on https://ryanwaggoner.substack.com/p/could-you-delete-your-em...

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Re:Knuth versus Email (1999) by jrochkind1 on Thursday August 27, 2020 @08:10AM (#24292838)

This was written a while ago. Can we figure out how long ago?

Well, internet archive verifies it existed on the web in 1997.

https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...

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Re:Knuth versus Email (1999) by richrichardsson on Thursday August 27, 2020 @07:17AM (#24292482)

As a PR piece for why most email to him goes unanswered?

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