As Knuth was given his task, McIlroy was given his own which he performed well.
I disagree that code reuse only works in rare instances. Rather, code reuse works better in small focused pieces than in large chunks. Utilities such as "sort" get used a lot.
The rare part is that a whole solution can be made out of UNIX utilities, not that UNIX utilities are used at all. Being familiar with the utilities available, much of the coding I currently do ends up being domain specific processing called from a shell script, often in a pipeline.
Also, sometimes I can answer feature requests from users by showing them how they can actually do it themselves on the UNIX command line. This kind of thing is often forgotten, as it's no longer "development." But code I don't have to write because the user can reuse utilities should certainly count.
I disagree that code reuse only works in rare instances. Rather, code reuse works better in small focused pieces than in large chunks. Utilities such as "sort" get used a lot.
The rare part is that a whole solution can be made out of UNIX utilities, not that UNIX utilities are used at all. Being familiar with the utilities available, much of the coding I currently do ends up being domain specific processing called from a shell script, often in a pipeline.
Also, sometimes I can answer feature requests from users by showing them how they can actually do it themselves on the UNIX command line. This kind of thing is often forgotten, as it's no longer "development." But code I don't have to write because the user can reuse utilities should certainly count.