The point, imho, is to illustrate literate programming, a technique designed to write easily understandable code. And the rebuttal is, that with high level tool

The point, imho, is to illustrate literate programming, a technique designed to write easily understandable code. And the rebuttal is, that with high level tools and a good documentation you can build as easily understandable code in about 20 lines including comments. (To be fair, one would need to understand all the tools used for comparison to Knuths program).