Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
Will the coming iconoclasts spare Don Knuth or are his digits doomed, with Kernighan and Ritchie’s, and Bentley’s and those of Guys like Steele? So far as a forecast is possible, it seems clear that their humor will not be his humor. Even now, persons who take their idea of humor from that form of it commonly found in recurring episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle may be sometimes heard to express a doubt about the humor of Don Knuth and the sincerity of those who profess to enjoy it, they themselves being, in their own phrase, unable to see any fun in it. The humor of Don Knuth has, however, the advantage of being based precisely on one’s nature — or the lack thereof — and as the digital nature of the future will probably be, upon the whole, much the same as the digital nature of the past, it is, perhaps, no unreasonable supposition that what has been proven to be a true word or two output in jest by one may continue to find some sort of acceptence among the quanta that oughta follow him.
— Extracted by twisting John Ormsby’s Introduction to
The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (1885)
It was a crazy type of satire on the sacred cows of the day,
so when my friends and I discovered it in high school
we devoured every page.
