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by floathub 425 days ago
For anyone emacs-curious, you can do a similar thing with org-babel

You can have a plaintext file which is also the program which is also the documentation/notebook/website/etc. It's extremely powerful, and is a compelling example of literate programming.

A good take on it here: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2019/program/proposa...

3 comments

Actually, in terms of capabilities, org-babel is among the most capable, if it is not the most capable, systems for literate programming. I have used it to great effect when learning from computer programming books. I can now go back to those literate programs, and understand again much faster, than originally when reading the books. The literate part of it answers my "silly" questions, that come from not remembering 100% of the reasoning or my own thoughts. That said, there is of course a learning curve, and people unwilling to learn something like that are better off not going that route.
Thanks for the shout-out! I think org-babel is really well suited for this task, and can make some really great documentation. You can check out the video[0] from the talk and a git repo[1] with a more advanced demonstration.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9BcZvQbXU

[1]: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/orgdemo2

Thanks for making the presentation. I found it very useful when I first started messing around with babel, and I still come back to it from time to time.
Similar with BBEdit's Shell Worksheets, which mingle prose with commands you can run with a keypress.