[derangedHorse]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I didn't find his way of programming to be all that more useful than just having well written code. The small code snippets are labeled and shown where they are referenced but this seems to mimic the functionality of functions which, when using an IDE like Visual Studio, can have where it's referenced identified through tooling.

[zozbot234]

The original literate programming was designed for early programming languages like Pascal, where support for forward references would've gotten in the way of efficient parsing and compiling. As you point out, it's less useful nowadays and it's been largely superseded by "lightweight" literate systems where formatted and structured documentation is programmatically extracted from the code rather than the converse.

[ParetoOptimal]

I think having vastly different presentation order and different cloned views over the same chunks of code are the biggest potential wins in literate programming.