I don't mean to take away from the books - they're beautiful and full of a lot of timeless knowledge. There's just something that seems a bit ... I can't even find a word for it ... about the endeavor.
You've yet to make the case that the fundamentals of computing science are changing so much that documenting them is not a worthy task.
Again, basic algorithms and data structures simply have not changed. Their performance characteristics, methods for optimal implementation, etc, certainly have as computer architectures have evolved (think reordering CPUs, multi-level caches, changes to data storage technology, etc). But the basic algorithms remain the same. Quicksort is still quicksort.
It's true that over the last decade some new concepts have reached a new prominence (e.g., lock-free data structures), but those are additions to the field. They certainly don't invalidate the basics.
These are computer science books, not software engineering books.
Woah there! No one ever said anything about 'not worthy'. I have tremendous admiration and respect for Knuth and his work, and like you say, a lot what he's written is timeless.
TAOCP is not only hyper-focused, obsessive, bloated, difficult, and outdated, but also genius and foundational and connected to everything.
Kind of like TeX and Metafont.
> faster than can be documented.
By one person, I wrote.
Here's one that I think is interesting, difficult and evolving: distributed systems. This shows interesting work happening with version vectors, for instance, over the past 15 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_vector
I wish him the best of lucky and sincerely hope he pulls it off.