Comment by cup-of-tea
8 years ago
> He has a great talk where he describes how the English language is optimized for dialogue (things like "I" and "you") and TeX messages are designed in that way.
Is this online? I listen to everything I can from Knuth but haven't heard this one.
I have seen it written down in print somewhere more eloquently (probably one of his interviews or conversations); the thing I was referring to (incorrectly) was not an entire talk of its own, but a passing brief remark (a few seconds or a minute) during one of the “Internal Details of TeX82” lectures about the source code of the TeX program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbqY1mTwrj8&list=PL94E35692E...). Sorry I don't have a more exact reference right now.