Donald Knuth

Some idle reading about ways to break a paragraph into lines took me to an article in Wikipedia about TeX, the typesetting program created by Donald Knuth. A consumate ratbag, as I surmise from the article:

Knuth began to write TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I–III of his monumental The Art of Computer Programming. In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He planned he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978, but as it happened the language was frozen only in 1989, more than ten years later.

TeX is unlike commercial software, which endlessly spawns new layers of complexity and flab:

Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. … The current version of TeX is 3.141592; it was last updated in December 2002.

Knuth has shown a remarkable committment to improving the quality of the program:

Knuth offers monetary awards to people who find and report a bug in it. The award per bug started at $2.56 and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. This has not made Knuth poor, however, as there have been very few bugs claimed and in any case a cheque proving that the owner found a bug in TeX is usually framed instead of cashed.