Re:Donald Knuth was framed
by pdpi on Monday February 24, 2020 @01:03PM
(#22406499)
> Which is that programmers naturally want to build perfect tools while the business need tends to be for a quick and dirty solution that can be assembled out of prebuilt pieces.
Nope, this is nothing of the sort. It's just a case of two people solving two different (if related) problems, and everybody else trying to draw (by necessity, completely worthless) conclusions by comparing solutions to different problems.
McIlroy solved the K most common words problem. Knuth used a from-the-ground-up solution to that problem as a way to illustrate how Literate Programming works. His solution was never meant to be as tiny as McIlroy's, it needed enough meat on it that LP actually did something non-trivial.
Re:Donald Knuth was framed
by btilly on Monday February 24, 2020 @01:27PM
(#22406797)
You missed my point. I was not saying that this story is a good example of that ongoing dynamic. But instead that there is such a dynamic in our industry, and the telling of the story resonates well with it.
Nope, this is nothing of the sort. It's just a case of two people solving two different (if related) problems, and everybody else trying to draw (by necessity, completely worthless) conclusions by comparing solutions to different problems.
McIlroy solved the K most common words problem. Knuth used a from-the-ground-up solution to that problem as a way to illustrate how Literate Programming works. His solution was never meant to be as tiny as McIlroy's, it needed enough meat on it that LP actually did something non-trivial.