| The details are even hairier. He wrote TeX82 (modern TeX) in WEB, a literate programming language he invented that could be tangled into the Pascal machine code or weaved into literate documentation in ... TeX itself. In fact he wrote WEB itself in WEB and by hand compiled the output of the tangle program, which he ran on the tangle source to get the same output. He also wrote the program METAFONT to produce the typefaces, which he used to design the Computer Modern font. And then he used that to write instruction books for TeX and METAFONT as well as new editions of The Art of Computer Science and others. TeX is still in regular use in the academic community (ported via Web2C) over 35 years later, despite the changes in technology in that time (with hacks to deal with modern fonts, outputting PDFs instead of DVI, including images and the like). He taught the yak to shave itself, and it's still clean shaven 35 years later. |