Comment by gnulinux

Comment by gnulinux 2 days ago

Literate programming is not just "documentation + code" any more than a textbook you read about Calculus is "documentation + CalculusCode" or a novel is "documentation + plot". It goes way beyond that, using literate programming you can attach an arbitrary text that accompanies the code such that fragments of your code is simply one part of the whole text. Literate programming is not just commenting (or supercommenting), if it were, you could use comments, it's a practice of simply attaching fragments of code in a separate text such that you can then later utilize that separate text the same way you utilize code. When you write a literate program, your end goal is the text and the program, not just the program. You can write a literate program, and publish it as is as a textbook, poem, blog post, documentation, website, fiction, musical notation etc... Unless you think that all human writing is documentation then literate programming is not just documentation.

crabbone a day ago

Yes. I tried it. And, eh... it's documentation + code (you can publish code + documentation as a textbook, poem, blog post, Website just as well). No need to exaggerate. It's also very inconvenient to write, for zero benefits. It's kind of like writing prose in one language, and then translating individual pieces of it into another language, while hoping that somehow the sum will still come out OK.

Some people like challenge in their lives... and I don't blame them. For sport, I would also rewrite some silly programs in languages I never intend to use, or do some code-golfing etc. Literate programming belongs in this general area of making extra effort to accomplish something that would've been trivial to do in a much simpler way.

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dayjaby a day ago

> it's kind of like writing prose in one language, and then translating individual pieces of it into another language
That's why I'm stuck in Tolstoi's War and Peace. You have to know French to get past the first few pages.

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- crabbone a day ago
  
  Ha! I had to read that in the 8th grade. At first it was very confusing, because I thought I for some reason got a book in French. But then I just skipped to the part where it started in Russian. Later, after a discussion in class, I got a vague idea that that part was some sort of a description of a ball and some high-society stuff... it wasn't at all useful for any further work we had to do on the book, so, I don't actually know what that part was about. All further reading and discussion focused on countess Olga and her thinking about the war (which the teacher claimed was the reflection of Tolstoy's own views).
  But, more to the point of literal programming: it's not the only tool that wants programmers to write some sort of a plan or a sketch of the code before writing code. A much more popular technique is TDD, which, again, wants programmers to write something informally first, and then formalize it later in code. And, as with literal programming, my experience was that it's not helpful to the point of being a distraction.
  There's a good reason to think that some sort of a sketch or a blueprint might be useful for the future program. It works like that in many other disciplines. Artists would make sketches before painting the picture, engineers make blueprints etc.
  I think that the reason why literal programming doesn't work is because unlike a sketch or a blueprint, one has to carry it on forever (and propagate back the changes, once they are discovered) as long as the code is being worked on. It probably would've worked better if it was some sort of a plan that can be abandoned at any point, something to give the development the initial push, but not requiring any further maintenance.
  
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