Incidentally, while this is a great post, the order of yak-shaving is actually pretty close to the opposite described in the post. He started with wanting a di

Incidentally, while this is a great post, the order of yak-shaving is actually pretty close to the opposite described in the post. He started with wanting a digital version of Monotype Modern 8A (what became Computer Modern). His first idea was to go to Xerox and use their scanning equipment to digitize the font, but they would only let him use it if they would have copyright on the resulting fonts, so he started looking deeper at the fonts himself. That gave him the idea of describing the font shapes from scratch (with equations) instead of simply scanning them, so he came up with METAFONT. To use his own digital fonts, he would need a typesetting system: TeX. He did implement TeX in SAIL, but when it became clear he would need to rewrite it in a portable way (Pascal), and Hoare suggested publishing the program as a book, he came up with literate programming and WEB. And as mentioned in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862858), TAOCP is itself a "yak shave", Knuth's response to being asked to write a book about compilers, in his first year of grad school in 1960 (given his compiler exploits earlier, like http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7 http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7). The publishers who were hoping to sell a book to aspiring early-1960s machine-language compiler-writers never got their wish, but they got something much more.