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by falcolas 1554 days ago
I think the one potential mitigating factor is that new features can be entirely new "chapters". Thanks to the tangling, a feature that needs to be added in 10 different places in the code can be written completely separately from the rest of the code.

Additionally, bugs can be fixed in-situ, refactoring can occur at will, and neither would require the prose around them to change, since code being talked about (despite moving or undergoing small changes) still fulfills the original, documented, purpose.

1 comments

It seems like adding new code as "Chapters," unless pursued with a bit of self-discipline, may result in spahgetti which is worse than a non-literate style.

Imagine a multi-person project where every little feature gets its own file, and now the programmer has to find the source of the bug between interacting blocks of in code fragments split across multiple files, ehich are combined together by tooling.... oh wait, I think that describes just about any sufficiently large C or C++ project.

> unless pursued with a bit of self-discipline

Any programming unless pursued with a bit of self-discipline may result in spaghetti code.

If you set things up well, you can avoid it for a little while - you just need the easiest hack to also be the right way to implement something