MIXing it up

Is there any value to reading The Art of Computer Programming anymore?

The series is a classic, and that means it carries loads of baggage along with its merits. I don't know of any universally accepted definition for a classic other than the tongue-in-cheek one:

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. -- Mark Twain

It sure strikes close to home for someone with a liberal arts education. Most software developers I know speak of the book with a mix of reverent respect and pitying affection; "it was an amazing achievement for its time, but it's so outdated now that it's more of a historical document than a useful guide for modern developers." My training has conditioned me to distrust this kind of attitude, if for no other reason than I spent my entire college career reading books that fit just this description. Plus, when I want to understand something through a book, I want the source; I hate textbooks and Reader's Digest-style summaries. I don't need any intermediaries between me and the original idea. I can handle it on its own merits. (Well, at least I SHOULD be able to.)

So I decided I wanted to read it. I got it for Christmas, and I'm up to about page 150. The first volume starts with some really intense math, and although I was always good at math, I'll admit frankly that I didn't understand most of it. Most "classics" are like that, though; the first time through your reaction is "Huh?", and the juicy nuggets only reveal themselves through repeated readings. So I pressed on and was treated to MIX, the ideal machine Knuth designed to illustrate algorithms in code.

MIX strongly resembles computers of the 60s, and its guts are unlike those of any modern machine. It's got registers and memory cells but no operating system; programs are written directly on the hardware layer in raw five-byte words. Bytes in MIX are not eight binary digits; they can be binary or decimal(!) and the only guarantee the programmer has is that they can contain at least 64 values (0-63) and at most 100. This is weird enough, as I've been thinking in binary forever. When dealing with values 64-100, you have to use two bytes to avoid undefined results; if it's a binary computer and needs two bytes for 90 and you only copy the first byte, you only get 63.

I haven't gotten to program this thing seriously yet (there's an assembly language called MIXAL that comes next), but it's radically different from a higher-order language. The machine does really next to nothing for you. You get to implement algorithms at the lowest level, which of course is the point, but I haven't implemented linked lists in assembly before.

Anyway, is implementing basic algorithms on an ideal machine really going to make me a better programmer? I don't know. I need to get a little further.