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/prog/ challenge: Knuth vs McIlroy

1 2021-03-27 13:08

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/don-knuth/pearls-2.pdf

Who won there? Knuth's 10 pager of litterate programming with all the insights into exquisite algorithms or McIlroy's straightforward one liner?

2 2021-03-30 22:28

It was completely unfair to Knuth. McIlroy wrote an inefficient program in the one domain Unix is halfway suited to. McIlroy would've failed miserably in, say, image-manipulation.

This would be akin to comparing Lisp to APL for matrix operations or APL to Lisp for manipulating linked structures, except for that both of those are paragons of their domains, unlike Unix.

3 2021-03-30 22:30

It was completely unfair to Knuth. McIlroy wrote an inefficient program in the one domain Unix is halfway suited to. McIlroy would've failed miserably in, say, image-manipulation.

This would be akin to comparing Lisp to APL for matrix operations or APL to Lisp for manipulating linked structures, except for that both of those are paragons of their domains, unlike Unix.

4 2021-03-31 05:29 *

I thought we were past this?

5 2021-03-31 07:10 *

>>4
you know who is back

6 2021-03-31 08:51 *

>>4
What?
>>5
Who?

7