Seibel: To read Knuth, it seems to me, you have to be able to read the math and understand it. To what extent do you think having that kind of mathematical training is necessary to be a programmer? Crockford: Obviously it's not, because most of them don't have it. In the sorts of applications that I'm working on, we don't see that much application of the particular tools that Knuth gives us. If we were writing operating systems or writing runtimes, it'd be much more critical. But we're doing form validations and UIs. Generally performance is not that important in the things that we do. We
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