It's hard to figure out McIlroy's motivation for responding this way. It's like Bentley asked Knuth to demonstrate long division, and McIlroy then wrote an arti

It's hard to figure out McIlroy's motivation for responding this way. It's like Bentley asked Knuth to demonstrate long division, and McIlroy then wrote an article criticizing Knuth for not using a calculator. Yes, Knuth could have used a calculator, but the calculator still needs a division algorithm, and `sort` probably needs a complex data structure or algorithm. (At least if it's to be fast and work on large files.) The only thing I can imagine, is that he wanted to advertise UNIX pipes (I would too!) and saw an opportunity to get attention by criticizing someone famous.