[hurril]

While there seems to be a difference in how they perceived what the stated problem actually was (where Knuth interpreted it as a call for a pedagogically laid out solution and McIlroy seemingly didn't?) I disagree with your conclusion here.

They chose different languages to express themselves in or with. Bash and WEB, respectively. Given other and perhaps even changing requirements, who knows what they'd have done? Why would McIlroy have had to resort to implementing (parts of) his solution in C and not, say, AWK or just in terms of more and other Bash constructs?

The conciseness, perhaps even terseness, to McIlroys expression is very elegant and despite the fact that I could not repeat that, I'd still call him a winner in a number of different hypothetical competitions drawn from this context of interactions.

And I'm in love with Donald Knuth!