Yep, at least he could use an OOP language, and some niceties like builders, decorators, factories, 15 layers of abstraction and indirection so everybody knows it's pro grade stuff. :)

If I where to ask “So what should he have used instead?” it would quickly derail this thread. There would be no consensus. Knuth probably foresaw this exact problem and more.

Yeah, if you read the intro to Volume 1, he specifically calls this out as an issue. I personally think he's taking a subtle dig at Numerical Recipes here, which did take the "modern" language approach.

Half of people would say Javascript and the other half Python. :)

Yes, I know those languages didn't exist at the time Knuth was forging his books.