| I believe Knuth published the entire source code for TeX as a book consisting of the output from his CWEB tool. I would love to browse through it... I mean, regardless of whether literate programming is viable for "enterprise software" or whatever, that's a wonderfully interesting cultural artifact... Inspiring! Some implementations of Unix were also published as books, as well as the original source code for PGP (as a free speech trump card to defeat cryptography export restrictions). These books, I presume, are archived by the Library of Congress, and will be around for a long time. Maybe one day we'll need them. Like if GitHub suddenly explodes and all the world's software is lost! How to read and write programs is still something of an open question, as far as I'm concerned. The effort involved in caring for a "literate" code base, and indeed the literacy required, is probably too much for most projects. I don't think that makes it a "bad" model. It seems good to have tools available, and for people to try it out. The Haskell world does a bit of literate programming, and tools like lhs2TeX are quite nice for preparing papers and such. There's something very beautiful about carefully written code that makes enough sense to be published as a "literate" paper. |