You have a slight typo in that first link, HN interpreted the semicolon as part of the link, fixed:
http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/errata/errorl...
This one stuck out for me:
* Time sharing is very slow today, so I'm mostly reading technical reports while
waiting three hours for compiler, editor, and loading routine.
* I'm not counting this as debugging time!
* (Came back in the evening.)
By time-sharing, does he mean sharing computing time on a cluster? I work on my university's cluster and on bad days, my jobs are queued for 4 hours and then run for 20 minutes...
Dude, you didn't even look at the pdf did you. That was the entry for 13 Mar 1978
I'm pretty sure clusters changed in their architecture and their processing power, but you still have to stand in line
In 1978 Time Sharing Machines refers to single machines with multi-tasking. ex. the terminal you are using right now. So you don't have to "wait in line" you have to share resources. Just like your web-browser shares resources with your editor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
esr also has a good article: http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/timesharing.html
I didn't know time sharing was still a thing.
Re:Keeping a debugging journal
by mattstreet on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @10:04PM
(#6766051)
Yeah for clusters/super computers...I mean you'd think more than one person wants to use them right?
The list is at http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/errata/errorl... the fairly long and very interesting paper he wrote about it ("The Errors of TeX") unfortunately doesn't seem to be freely available, but there's a very short informal article (also by Knuth) about it at http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb10-4/tb26knut.pdf.
He classifies all the errors he's ever found (or had found by others) into 15 categories. (Here "errors" includes "enhancements found to be a good idea", just as in many issue-tracking systems.) In the full "Errors" paper he has much to say about each category, including concrete examples and more philosophical ruminations.