McIlroy’s solution was to just use few programs Donald's Knuth's of the world previously wrote to hack together suboptimal solution to his current problem.
Ultimately his approach won and today >90% of programming is just stitching together the code someone else wrote so it sorta works for your problem.
Much maligned here nodejs ecosystem is implementation of his approach to web development.
I think this is overly negative. McLlroy solution, albeit maybe cheap / suboptimal, also shows a bit of algebraic, composable qualities. You have a simple model, and pipes to connect partial solutions. Iterating through different parameters allows to quickly adapt / converge to different solutions. Focus on reuse too.
Meanwhile Knuth's compiler techniques volume of TAOCP will be published when he is 145 years old?
We'd never get anything done if we programmed like Knuth. You can do good literate programming but you have to be living in a truly slow world to do it like Knuth does.
Ultimately his approach won and today >90% of programming is just stitching together the code someone else wrote so it sorta works for your problem.
Much maligned here nodejs ecosystem is implementation of his approach to web development.