[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 As you point out, it's less useful nowadays and it's been largely superseded by "lightweight" literate systems where formatted and structured documentation is programmatically extracted from the code rather than the converse.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.