I'm also incredibly grateful --- I was gifted a NeXT Cube by my brother-in-law when I was in college studying graphic design, and I was incredibly put out by the paucity of nice typography features in Quark XPress and Aldus Pagemaker when I came across TeXview.app and remembered checking out the book _TeX and Metafont_ from the local college library when I was a senior in high school --- built that into a career and a series of presentations at TUG conferences where I got to meet him.
From what I understand, TAoCP is building up to that compilers book! When initially tasked with writing about compilers, he realized all the background necessary for building them and planned out these books as an overview of computational techniques that would be helpful to use.
