Knuth and the Unix Way
McIlroy's basic point is that, instead of building single-use programs, we should be directing our effort towards building reusable components, i.e. Unix utilities. Then, over time, most programs could be built as a simple piping together of high-level components.<p>This vision seems to have failed for about 5 decades now, but it is still a popular one. After no one was able to build serious applications by gluing together Unix utilities, it was thought that we would instead build serious applications by gluing together objects. This vision has also failed (or at least, not succeeded in a very apparent way). In the mean time there have been other promised types of "componentry", like COM, CORBA, WS-*, ..., all more or less complete failures (or at least, egregiously unapparent successes).<p>So, in my view, it is Knuth who has the last laugh.