Distributed RVS, Darcs, tech love

[Joachim Durchholz]

Lew schrieb:
> I am afraid that your conclusion is quite mistaken.  Knuth is, if 
> anything, a huge success in the field of software engineering, whether 
> you rate it as making a contribution to the art, or as being paid to 
> perform the art.

Well, sort of.
Some of the code given is unreadable. (He obviously didn't take the 
"structured programming" thing to heart.)
Worse, some of the code given is inscrutable, and remains unexplained 
(e.g. the code for the spectral test algorithm).
Whole classes of algorithms were omitted. This is probably no fault of 
Knuth as a programmer, but simply a field that's moving faster than a 
single person can keep up with.

These are small detractions from a large overall contribution.
In particular, I find llothars characterization of TeX wrong: it is one 
of the least buggy typesetting programs ever written (not a small feat), 
and it *still* produces output that is as least as good as what other 
programs do, and in fact better than the vast majority.
It also has downsides, most notably the markup language is pure horror.

TeX's markup language is a dead end.
TeX's algorithm isn't. Actually it has been extracted from the software 
and is available as a functional program, waiting to be embedded into a 
typesetting system with more modern qualities.

Regards,
Jo