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I'm not sure how it's a fair comparison between ready-made Unix tools and written-from-scratch solution. I mean it's like somebody asked me to implement a C com

by smsm42 7y ago

I'm not sure how it's a fair comparison between ready-made Unix tools and written-from-scratch solution. I mean it's like somebody asked me to implement a C compiler, and when I produced a huge pile of source code would tell me "Idiot, I can do all that by just typing "gcc"! Muah-hah-ha!"

dllthomas 7y ago
In my second compiler design course, we were told we could use any language. I (jokingly) asked whether we could choose shell, and consider a C compiler a feature of the language. I was (in the same spirit) informed that it would be cheating.
- smsm42 7y ago
  Some languages do include self-compilers as part of the runtime... So probably "any" wasn't meant really "any".
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    The target language was (a subset of) C, so access to a lisp compiler wasn't going to help in quite the same way.
hobofan 7y ago
It's a fair comparison in a real world context. If you were to solve the problem at your job, would you start writing the program from scratch, or would you use ready-made tools made for the job?
- smsm42 7y ago
  It's not Knuth's job to write efficient word-sorting programs. That job is long done and now it's nobody's job (unless one can do better than existing tools, but that wasn't Knuth goal either). His job was to demonstrate how you do literate programming, which is completely different. If I needed to demo how to program certain algorithm so that I could explain it to students, I'd write one code, if I needed absolutely fastest possible tool, I'd write another code (probably in C or some asm even). Different tasks - different approaches.