Just to be clear, it was not a competition. For more, please follow the links from some of the previous HN discussions, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i

Just to be clear, it was not a competition. For more, please follow the links from some of the previous HN discussions, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301777. [For those who may not follow all the links: Bentley asked Knuth to write a program in Pascal (WEB) to illustrate literate programming—i.e. explaining a long complicated program—and so Knuth wrote a beautiful program with a custom data structure (hash-packed tries). Bentley then asked McIlroy to review the program. In the second half of the review, McIlroy (the inventor of Unix pipes) questioned the problem itself (the idea of writing a program for scratch), and used the opportunity to evangelize Unix and Unix pipes (at the time not widely known or available).]