This is one of those book series that I really, really want to purchase as a beautiful, matching, leather-bound set. And, yes, I would read it for pleasure, and I would treasure it.
The joke, for anyone else here who isn't a book nerd (my wife is), is that now whenever an old author dies with unfinished work, or hasn't finished their work (that's you, George!) people make a joke "Just let Brandon Sanderson finish it!" because Mr. Sanderson is an absolute writing beast, he's a "100x writer" if there ever was one and he is working on (or finished?) a book series[0] by a now-dead author and most people think he made it better.
I'm flattered, but have no idea where that came from. While I have implemented some interesting data structures and algorithms in my time, I don't consider myself a "Computer Scientist" or algorithms expert. However, I did work with Knuth in the 1980s, and am in a group photo in his "Digital Typography" book. I agree with all the nice things people have said about him.
I was thinking the same thing when I clicked on the comments. I somewhat expect this will be the last volume in the series, so one could now hope to buy a "complete" set. I would love to revisit and explore all of the material using modern programming languages.
One might hope that he can at least complete 4C such that volume 4 is complete. I am skeptical that volume 5 or later will see the light of day, But I also cannot predict the future.
This comment made me check the history of the official TAOCP page [1] through the Wayback Machine. Volume 5 was estimated to be ready in 2009 at the very first snapshot (1997), in 2010 by 2003, in 2015 by 2007, in 2020 by 2010, in 2025 by 2015 which is the latest estimate today. At the first glance this looks like an eternal "10 years later", but note that that estimate didn't change since 2015 and the 2025 estimate is now only 3 years away. Does this mean that Knuth does plan to publish anything related to Volume 5 by that time?
Same - it's just a joy dropping into some random section and reading through, but my copies are a little abused by that practice. I'd love to have a second set for aesthetics and display.
