Ask HN: any experience with literate programming?

3 points

15 years ago

The concept of literate programming was invented in the 1970's by DEK with WEB [1] during the rise of structured programming. In my understanding, the goal of literate programming is to implement concepts in programs by following one's own approach, and make it understandable to other human beings.

WEB and its relatives rely on a programming language (eg. C) and a document formatting language (eg. TeX). The program and its documentation are written at the same time, in an unique source file. At anytime, one can extract the whole source files (aka 'tangling') or the documentation explaining its implementation (aka 'weaving').

Have you ever used literate programming? What is you experience with it?

[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf

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