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by svat 1554 days ago
I would go further: literate programming is not just "much more than" commenting code, because you can do LP without commenting much. The main thing in LP is the idea/orientation of writing as if you're writing something for a human reader. This does often lead to more comments, but even something like "here's the code" followed by lots of code can be LP, if you deem it sufficient for your intended audience. (Earlier comment of mine about target audience and not over-commenting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871047)

This works well for people who are writers by nature (like Knuth who's always making edits and improvements to his books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30149221). One problem though (and there are several) is that because this is so personal, nearly everyone who seriously tries LP ends up writing their own LP tool (including the author of this post!).
1 comments
WorldMaker 1553 days ago
I'm somewhat hopeful the growing ubiquity of especially Jupyter notebooks leads to better, more universal tools for literate programming. Notebooks have always been a form of literate programming. Jupyter and its underlying formats are now ubiquitous enough with a lot of strong IDE support (across a variety of IDEs) that I'm hopeful a better convergence as a "general literate programming platform" from the notebook side may just be a matter of time. (Other than that a lot of strong LP proponents so far seem to mostly be oblivious to the happenings in Notebook spaces and vice versa, despite there being so much cross-over.)
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svat 1553 days ago
Yes I agree (and share the hope). In fact, earlier today I was thinking about Peter Norvig's "pytudes" (https://github.com/norvig/pytudes) as good examples of literate programming — and they are notebooks. Also, last weekend I picked up some code I had written a few months ago, threw it all away and started writing it in a notebook (Colab) precisely for this "literate programming" reasons.

There's also "nbdev" (https://github.com/fastai/nbdev) which seems like it should be the best of both worlds, but I couldn't quite get it to work.

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