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by driggs 527 days ago
I very strongly disagree. The most successful implementation of literate programming is the Jupyter Notebook, formerly called iPython Notebook. Even when you write it as raw markdown, there's no issue mixing documentation with triple-backtick code blocks.

Maybe you're thinking of mixing Python with HTML? Python based HTML templating can be ugly, and the significant indentation of Python is a very poor mix for replacing Javascript in whitespace-agnostic HTML.

2 comments

I thought tools like jupyter and rmarkdown are better described as narratives[0] (lab notebooks and report generators) separate from and almost antagonistic to literate programming[1]. At least as I've been exposed to them, notebooks don't easily facilitate code reuse -- libraries aren't written in notebooks but could be written with literate programming tools.

[0]: https://khinsen.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/beyond-jupyter-what... [1]: http://www.literateprogramming.com/

> there's no issue mixing documentation with triple-backtick code blocks.

Your argument became: By adding delimiters, even Python can play well with other languages. /s