Thanks a lot for conducting this interview, transcribing it, and sharing it! It's lovely, and covers a lot of interesting/new ground; your questions are well-chosen. I've read/heard/watched a lot of Knuth interviews the last few years (there's a list of some of them at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news20.html#:~:text=Oral%20hi... and at https://tug.org/interviews/#knuth), and he tends to be remarkably consistent in his answers, but you've managed to ask interesting questions that elicit new answers. :-) And of course even the repeated stuff is still interesting.

Yes reaching him can be hard, as joked about by Wilf on his 64th birthday (https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/website/dek.pdf). :-) If I understand correctly, this interview was conducted over the phone? If so, I also imagine that transcribing it must have been quite a bit of effort; his speech tends to have a fair bit of "backtracking" / "buffering" as I've found when I tried to transcribe something a while ago. So thanks for producing something so readable.

Some notable (to me) highlights, for anyone else who has not yet read the linked interview:

- The story of how The Art of Computer Programming came about. He was approached by the publisher in 1962 when he was a recently married second-year graduate student, to write a book about how to write compilers. He thought it needs more background and came up with a 12-chapter outline with Compilers as the final chapter, and thought it would be done before his son was born (1965), as of 2020 it's less than half done. :-) He actually had a handwritten manuscript of 3000 pages completed in early 1966 and thought that when printed it would be about 400 printed pages, but he was off and it would have been 2000 pages if printed. So the plan became 7 volumes. (He goes into more detail in his 2007 CHM Oral History for example: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...)

- How he tries to make precise statements ("maximize my chance of error"), and writes programs to see for himself which methods are faster ("I can't write about something unless I've experienced it personally"). And how he does this while staying "smooth", adding technical jokes, and trying to be surprising! His motivation is always to share: "Isn't this cool?"

- On staying motivated: his simple motivation is that he enjoys learning and enjoys telling others what he's learned. His main computer is also not connected to the internet; he goes to the internet-connected computer only to upload stuff.

- He actually doesn't seem to worry at all about impact or importance; he just writes stuff that he needs or feels ought to exist. (I think his taste helps here!) He's unbothered by what others might consider failures of adoption (Metafont, literate programming, his composition Fantasia Apocalyptica?).

- His usual thoughts on literate programming, e.g. "by taking a little bit of extra time to explain what the code is doing, I get my thoughts in order and I make many fewer mistakes". (Aside: He mentions the PBRT book (http://www.pbr-book.org/) and thinks there is other software being written at Pixar/elsewhere using literate programming; does anyone know if this is actually true? Or is this program/book an exception?)

- He mentions some problem in constraint satisfaction (the section of TAOCP he's currently working on) on pp 14–15, maybe someone can guess details of what this specific problem is?

- One finding ways to enjoy what you're doing. (He's mentioned here, and elsewhere too, how he's never bored; how one can always find some way to enjoy things. Recall the example of buying janitor uniforms to make toilet-cleaning at home more fun! From an earlier article, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22889195) He's not bothered by commercialization/things being spoiled for example; he just focuses on what's beautiful and one can be proud of.

(A few typos I noticed in the current version of the PDF: "Apocalypitca" (p1), "wonderfull" (p9), and in a few places, words are joined it appears that (probably) "—I" (an em dash followed by the word "I") turned into just "I": "I was blown awayI" (p3), "core memoryI" (p4), "practiceI" (p4). And the phrase "from two different slaps" (p6) sounds odd; sure he didn't say something else? Then again, maybe that's exactly what he said, things being slapped into one's brain.)

Good luck with your book too!