[krichman]

One of the things Knuth is famous for is writing a lengthy program for word counts that was equivalent to no more than 6 lines of shell script.

I highly doubt that he's wrong regarding his own programs, but it's most certainly wrong for the majority of programmers.

PS if we're going to appeal to authority, Church and Lambda Calculus were there first.

[d0mine]

Discussion of the word count problem Knuth vs. McIlroy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304696