Quote by Knuth

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Monday, July 19, 2021 at 11:25 AM
> From: "Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor" <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Quote by Knuth
>
> Christopher Dimech wrote:
>
> > But Knuth idea goes more than that because he was obsessed
> > with presentation and wanted science to be like a work of
> > literature. Without understanding that most work is not work
> > of literature.
>
> But that's very normal and, broadly speaking, expected for
> a man with the turns that his career took. What would you
> expect, the creator of TeX saying, "hey, why do you guys care
> so much what the documents _look_ like?" ???
>
> Well, _he_ for one cared about that and he developed a good
> tool for that!
>
> "Literate programming" was his way of theorizing about TeX and
> the family of tools and methods he developed, pushed for, and
> cared for. I understand that now, it wasn't hyped as
> a superior model for programming in general. Then it makes
> much more sense.

Have read his work on literate programming (though not his theorising).  With
actual programming, he delved into showing that it is possible to implement with
pascal, which he used to program Tex.  Which is something very different than
saying that literate programming should be the goal of any language.
He did that in 1984, long after the development of the first high-level languages.
Many have been doing very well with fortran, C, and lisp.


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