Richard: You just pick things up. People tell you these things, and that happened to some with Bloomberg. They’d come to us and say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this optimization,” and I said “Never occurred to me.” “Well, can you do it?” “Let’s see what we can do,” and then it would go in, so, yeah, kind of figure it out as you went along. I had to invent a lot of this myself. Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did.
Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it.
Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book?
Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does.
https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
Richard: You just pick things up. People tell you these things, and that happened to some with Bloomberg. They’d come to us and say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this optimization,” and I said “Never occurred to me.” “Well, can you do it?” “Let’s see what we can do,” and then it would go in, so, yeah, kind of figure it out as you went along. I had to invent a lot of this myself. Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did.
Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it.
Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book?
Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does.