| > My version of literate-programming may have a bit too much possibility of that magic. To be honest, that was (part of) my initial reaction. But at the same time, playing with noweb, reading a bit of literate C etc -- I think some tooling on the literate side can be good. Sometimes one wishes for too much, and too late realize that the beautiful unique snowflake of a poem one has wrought is, while splendid in its simplicity, as brittle and hard as ice. It just not something one will be entirely comfortable handing over to someone else to modify -- because even if they could figure out what it did, they'd be hard press to modify it in any meaningful way. Too dense isn't very good either. Sometimes I think that literate programming and APL stand at opposite corners of some kind of 2d graph of program complexity/simplicity (not necessarily diagonally opposed). I'm not entirely sure what would be in the other corners. I came across your blog post, and I think we are in agreement on a lot of things: http://jostylr.tumblr.com/post/83304256984/architectural-fog But I also think a very real problem with literate programming (to quote Knuth?) is that it demands people to be both good (technical) writers and good programmers. Some are both - more are one or the other. I think the best way to get a simple, yet featureful literate programming system, is to combine a simple markup language, like RST/Markdown/etc with a language that lends itself to be pulled apart and rearranged. I think something simple, like Smalltalk might be a good candidate. So far the only real literate programming I do, is with doctests in python -- and to a lesser extent, ipython notebooks. I remember I looked at Leo: http://leoeditor.com/ -- and have been toying with moving from vim to Emacs+evil partially for the benefit of org-mode -- but these still feel like very heavy solutions to something that I feel should be a rather simple problem. That feeling might be wrong, though. Another tool I've come across (which might be abandoned, I'm not sure) is: http://pywebtool.sourceforge.net/ Regardless of the state of the tool itself, the page has some interesting points on literate programming. I must admit, getting something like proper LaTeX typsetting of the code is nice though. I'm still looking for a tool that doesn't botch up the (La)TeX conversion and html+css conversion of simple RST/md-documents -- it seems everyone tries to be way too clever, and bundle the weirdest little themes/template leaving one to pick apart everything just to get some straightforward html/TeX. Not to mention trying to output HTML from (La)TeX. At least for html output we now have a few half-decent alternatives thanks to everyone writing a static blog engine. And pandoc. Pandoc is great. |