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by Chris_Newton
466 days ago
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I find Literate Programming interesting partly because it’s almost the opposite of the much-advocated “many small functions” style. You could literally be writing a book that explains your program, and the code becomes almost secondary material to illustrate the main text rather than the main asset itself. I did once write a moderately substantial application as a literate Haskell program. I found that the pros and cons of the style were quite different to a lot of more popular/conventional coding styles. More recently, I see an interesting parallel between a literate program written by a developer and the output log of a developer working with one of the code generator AIs. In both cases, the style can work well to convey what the code is doing and why, like good code comments but scaled up to longer explanations of longer parts of the code. In both cases, I also question how well the approach would continue to scale up to much larger code bases with more developers concurrently working on them. The problems you need to solve writing “good code” at the scale of hundreds or maybe a few thousand lines are often different to the problems you need to solve coordinating multiple development teams working on applications built from many thousands or millions of lines of code. Good solutions to the first set of problems are necessary at any scale but probably insufficient to solve the second set of problems at larger scales on their own. |
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I've been working to maintain a list of Literate Programs which have been published (as well as books about the process):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
I'd be glad of any I missed, or other links to literate programs.
The list of projects so tagged on Github may be of interest:
https://github.com/topics/literate-programming