Sunday, July 29, 2012

Monolithism and literate programming

Interesting story of an example program Donald Knuth wrote and a critique by Doug McIlroy.  Knuth's program, as Knuth's programs tend to be, was monolithic, taking and handling each aspect of the problem in turn and weaving the whole thing into a Pascal program for compilation.  McIlroy's solution was a six-line shell script.

The point here is that Knuth's program did nothing at all to support or to make use of reusability.  And that's a pretty good point.

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