Donald Knuth was framed (2020)
(2020)<p>It seems to me that both McIlroy’s original critique and this blog post miss the point by a mile. It’s completely meaningless to compare the relative merits of the two solutions, because Knuth’s ultimate goal isn’t to produce a solution.<p>Doing a presentation on literate programming has to deal with two more or less contradictory concerns — you need a sufficiently simple problem that your audience can follow along, but you need your solution to be complex enough that you can actually illustrate LP.<p>A sorted frequency table is a simple enough problem statement, a trie is a sufficiently elaborate solution that doesn’t feel <i>too</i> contrived while also being familiar enough that the audience can follow along. Knuth’s approach was pretty much the perfect way to hit both of those requirements!