I share your admiration for Knuth, but let's not get carried away. Knuth spent 10 years working on TeX and he worked on what was then a fairly unchanging proble

I share your admiration for Knuth, but let's not get carried away. Knuth spent 10 years working on TeX and he worked on what was then a fairly unchanging problem domain. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many of the needs typesetters have today were (by Knuth's design) pushed into the macro system or the back-ends, thereby making the core of Knuth's work inherentlys stable. I think that many good developers today, given 10 years of receiving grants, and an unchanging problem set could write high-quality, very stable, very solid code, especially with a large community providing bug reports. To be clear, I celebrate Knuth's achievement, but I don't view it as a commentary on how software is written today.