[zohebv]

I think functional programmers would disagree with your thesis :-) As an example http://xmonad.org/manpage.html - Window manager in 200 lines of code http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots

Or FRAN

http://conal.net/papers/icfp97/

I am sure there are pretty cool smalltalk and lips examples too.

Knuth is an algorithms engineer and his solution reflects his background. McIlroy's invention of pipes was seminal, but the state of the art has moved on much further. I think David Turner's contributions via SASL have never been fully acknowledged. I would posit that we now know how to go about achieving the composability techniques required to build large programs easily. The answer seems to lie embedded somewhere deep inside category theory! The ideas are slowly getting popular and seeping over to mainstream languages. At least for me, the way I program today is fundamentally different from 12 years ago.