[em500]

This essay seems to be missing the main primary references for literate programming:

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html

Knuths intention seems clear enough in his own writing:

Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.

and

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

[zahlman]

> I chose the name WEB partly because it was one of the few three-letter words of English that hadn’t already been applied to computers.

Heh.

[bombcar]

The earth if it was World Wide WEB …

[rhdunn]

In a way this is what notebooks are for Python and other languages. They mix documentation and code such that you can run that code and inspect the output. See for example the pytorch tutorials.

[d-lisp]

Yes, notebooks are a restrictive type of litterate programming, interactive and browser bound.

TeX was "proven" as a text/typography tool by the fact that the source code written in WEB (interleaving pascal and TeX (this is meta (metacircular))) allows for you to "render" the program as a typographed work explaining how TeX is made+ run the program as a mean to create typographic work.

I'm lacking the words for a better explanation of how do I feel sbout the distinction, but in a sense I would say that notebooks are litterate scrips, while TeX is a litterate program ? (The difference is aesthetical)

[electroglyph]

or all the unsloth notebooks

[d-lisp]

I dream of a world where the Knuth idea of programming and mathematics are naturally embedded in our cultures, like novels are.

I find it weird to not be able to find linux source code and commentaries or even math/physics/science masterpieces in libraries where you can find Finnegan's Wake easily (at least where do I live), and not be able to talk about the GHC in between two discussion about romance or the weather at the bakery.

[Nevermark]

> I find it weird to not be able to find linux source code and commentaries

That one statement is a great concise explanation/motivation for "literate programming".

Explanations with code, that explain code design choices, in a way that enables the code to be understood better, and the ideas involved to be picked up and applied flexibly to reading and writing other code.

Another way to view it is: Developers are "compilers" from ideas to source. Documenting the ideas along with the "generated" source, is being "open source" about the origin and specific implementation of the source.

[smusamashah]

If a program has very detailed comments will it fall under literate programming pattern?