“He wasn’t competing with McIlroy, and didn’t know how McIlroy was going to critique it.”
The legend says Knuth wrote eight pages of literate Pascal and McIlroy beat it with six lines of shell. Read the actual paper. One page is the problem statement, one is the index, and almost four are a hand-built hash trie, because Pascal had nothing. Knuth was asked to demo a tool and got scored as if it were a contest. Everybody repeats the story and nobody reads the source.