[LukeShu]

I agree with you, the Haskell solution is worse. But I disagree with some of your reasons.

Forget the ubiquity of Unix. Forget POSIX--McIlroy's text was written before even the first drafts of POSIX.

Part of the premise of the challenge to Knuth was to use his solution to advocate for his programming system: WEB (essentially a variant of Pascal)--look how great it is to program in WEB! So naturally, McIlroy included in his response a comparison to his programming system: UNIX. Knuth had designed WEB to make programming nicer; McIlroy had designed UNIX[1] to make programming nicer. It wasn't just a showdown between word count programs, it was a showdown of WEB vs UNIX.

And to hear some people tell it, the things that lead to Unix's victory in that little showdown are the same things that lead to its ubiquity today. If people liked Knuth's solution better, maybe we'd have WEB/Pascal systems everywhere instead of Unix.

[1]: He wasn't the sole designer, but he did invent pipes, which is the big item in using the Unix shell as a programming model.

[flogic]

It's a bit of an unfair comparison though. The problem and tool set were predefined before Knuth started. Also it's a problem that's particularly suited to Unix tools. There are many problems where Web might have resulted in the better solution. As a kid, I saw a program that computed the position of Moon in the sky given a location and time. That would probably be better solved with WEB than Unix pipes.