[tunesmith]

Yeah, it just seems to me that wonderfully written literate documentation would be poorly organized software, and wonderfully organized software would be poorly organized documentation.

I guess what I mean by that is that as software scales out, your code will be more along the lines of "do this logic whenever this function/method happens to be invoked". So it would be great for documenting the workings of a function/method, but it would be poor for actually documenting the lifecycle of a logic path, like the lifecycle of a request. I certainly wouldn't have one file where I handle a request, do some business logic, and interact with a database, even though that is how you might document a lifecycle the request.

[bshimmin]

I fully agree with this and the grandparent. I've written a handful of literate programs, and I found that it worked nicely for a parser, which read from top to bottom in a single file, and it worked quite well for some unit tests, where the extra documentation and the tests themselves - which are quite self-documenting anyway - sat together rather nicely (though it was less well-received by my colleagues, who decried it as neurotic and pointless). My other attempts - particularly a small web app with a bunch of GUI components - were much less successful.

[jostylr]

Did you write it as a single file that breaks up into multiple files or was each separate file corresponding to a separate literate document?

My tool takes the approach of more of a literate-project approach where one file may generate multiple files (and multiple files could generate one file). The idea is that the organization is completely up to the author with no boundaries between how they want to organize it.

And referring to earlier comment, I would write the same flow of logic for a single thought in the same place. There is the flow of a single process and there are commonalities across processes. I think a good literate programming allows the uniqueness of a single flow to be put into one place and the commonalities to be extracted and applies to such a flow.