To his great credit, Knuth included McIlroy's critique, in full and without response, when he published Literate Programming. Knuth also conceded in an earlier

To his great credit, Knuth included McIlroy's critique, in full and without response, when he published Literate Programming. Knuth also conceded in an earlier chapter that literate programming was probably a crazy idea and that promoting it was perhaps an act of madness! It's delightful that we live in a world where there's room both for industrial-strength Fabergé eggs and hack-it-together pipelines. :)