> 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 o

> 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.