From: Mikael Brockman <mikael@...>
Date: 2004-08-31T06:40:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Typos (Was: performance comparison)

Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@scriptolutions.com> writes:

> Hello Mark,
> 
> MP> There are better ways of coding in C.  Try, for example
> 
> MP>   http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html
> 
> Sorry but the hole idea of literature programming is one of the most
> stupid thing i've ever seen in the world of programming.
> It does not work and it shows again that Donald E. Knuth is living in a
> galaxy far far away.

Indeed.  For one, he's a genius and you're not.  He's a technical writer
with the Bible under his belt.  You can't say ``it does not work'',
because it provably does: just look at TeX.

> Adding the redundancy and ambiguity of natural languages is making
> the problem worse. Real programs change a lot and under time pressure.

A specific subset of ``real programs'' do.  TeX doesn't.

> Sorry i doubt that Knuth has real world experience.

Conjuring into existance two different worlds and putting your opponent
in the unworthy one is a very clever trick.  Actually, the phrase ``real
world'' has nearly become an argument in itself.  You can use it to
disqualify anything.  How convenient!

> Even with a high IQ a person can be a huge fool

Of course, but why do you suppose this is the case with Knuth?  Has CWEB
not worked for TeX?

> Can you give me one example of a larger program that uses the CWeb
> style, lets make it easy and say something with more then 100.000 lines
> (a medium scale project) ?

If you can't answer this question yourself, I don't think you're
qualified to say zip about Knuth.