> As with others before, the author fails to grasp that this is an apples to oranges comparison. I think comparing apples to oranges would be comparing Knuth a

> As with others before, the author fails to grasp that this is an apples to oranges comparison. I think comparing apples to oranges would be comparing Knuth as a programmer to Spinellis (the author of the blog post) as a programmer; they obviously have different approaches to programming, which one can't compare without bringing in some externally imposed value judgements. The post itself isn't a comparison at all: it says "this task, which was claimed to be very difficult using only a certain set of tools, is actually easier than one would expect even when restricted to those tools." (OK, I guess 'easier' is a comparison, technically, but only to expectations.) This says nothing about the quality of Knuth, or of Spinellis, or of the ideologies of tool use and tool creation; it says only that the existing Unix toolkit is very rich, much more so than some might expect.