[svat]

This is a surprising comment, and especially this part:

> it's kind of evident that writing clearly wasn't in Knuth's DNA just by reading his famous books

— my experience, from reading (parts of) several of Knuth's books and papers, is the very opposite: Knuth is one of the finest writers, and writing is clearly in Knuth's DNA — even among the many hats he has worn (mathematician, programmer, computer scientist, teacher), at heart of everything is writing. (His Selected Papers on Fun and Games includes some stuff he wrote in high school and college; even those show his spirit.)

IMO, every page of his is a delight to read. I think the issue for those who find it otherwise may be that he writes in a very personal way (his personality shines through), and for those who are looking for something bland or generic, this can be a surprise.

Then again, this may be one of the chief problems with literate programming in general (why it works so well with one author, and doesn't seem to have had much success with a large team): writing is very personal, and for many-person codebases something "generic" may in fact work better.