Distributed RVS, Darcs, tech love

[Marc Espie]

In article <1192998506.251127.172530 at v29g2000prd.googlegroups.com>,
llothar  <llothar at web.de> wrote:
>On 21 Okt., 22:45, Lew <l... at lewscanon.com> wrote:
>
>> Evidence is that TeX development is dead.
>
>Exactly and Knuths only contribution to software development was the
>theory of
>"literate" programming. As i said for me algorithms are not software
>development,
>this is programming in the small (something left for coding apes), not
>programming
>in the large. There are no problems anymore with programming the
>small, sure you
>can try to develop Judy Arrays or another more optimized sorting
>algorithm, but
>this has no real world effect. It is theoretical computer science -
>well a few
>people seem to like this.

Boy, you really have to get a clue.

Apart from the fact that Knuth wrote a book series that is still THE
definitive series on computer algorithms (and that most people who need
these algorithms know those books... they document a fairly large set of
interesting facts about floating point arithmetic, and the designers of
cpu would do well to read them and not cut to many corners for IEEE754.
They also a document a large set of useful algorithms, some of them
fairly commonplace as soon as you need some efficiency), no, he hasn't
done anything smart.

No real world effect ? Ah! have a look inside your computer at some point.
You'll be surprised where you find those algorithms (your kernel is likely
to use some of them, for instance). And perl is probably better for 
Knuth's study of hash algorithms...

As far as TeX being `dead' goes, it's just finished, from Knuth's point of
view. It doesn't prevent TeX-based distributions from thriving (TeXlive
being the latest fad), and TeX-derived projects from going forward...