19 Nov
2011
19 Nov
'11
1:33 p.m.
On 19/11/11 4:02 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 11/19/2011 01:01 AM, Richard wrote:
And their internals are practically *never* as thoroughly described in
English as TeX and METAFONT are.
And how many large object oriented systems have exponential bug
bounties? Or could ever afford one?
--Toby
...
Knuth's attempt at "literate programming", to write a book that
documents the implementation and shows you the implementation at the
same time by interleaving prose and source code is IMO a complete and
utter failure.
And yet many other major software packages that are written in extreme
object-oriented methodologies tend to be hulking beasts that are so full of bugs that they're sometimes barely usable. Once
again, one wonders if
Knuth was onto something.
Or perhaps he wasn't onto anything at all, and he's just an extremely
competent programmer who can write good code in any language.
-Dave