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This reminds me of the story in which Don Knuth wrote a literate program in WEB (reportedly over 10 pages) to do some text processing and Doug McIlroy did the s

• cb321 3y ago
  Knuth was asked to demonstrate his new literate programming and probably thought an 8-page mini-paper was about the right "length" to do so: https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/donald-knuth-was-framed/ McIlroy was asked to show off productivity in the newly popular Unix system, and he did that. While often framed as "a contest" the two approaches are really solving different enough problems as being apples-oranges. So, the only meaningful judgement of a contest is "who better achieved their narrow goals?" I've found in discussions with people that they seem unable to separate their judgement of "a winner" from their own personal weight on the value of the two narrow goals ("detailed articulation mixing code & text" vs. "just getting shit done"). There is probably some broader lesson about people in that (and indeed probably a specific term in the science of psychology) - those who really like apples or really like oranges being inclined to force a non-contest into one of their favored "Eat oranges!" rhetorical moves. EDIT: and it's actually even more subtle - the very same person can side with either depending on broader context or framing. There are those who would praise detailed documentation over write-only hacks requiring detailed memory of tool innards in one situation yet decry it as a waste of time in another. (All part of why survey results are not to be accepted naively.)