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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)


vocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel.

I think this is exactly backwards; codebases are easy to read primarily due to the author's efforts to orchestrate the presentation, and only secondarily by typesetting improvements. The ability to change order is under-used, perhaps because early literate tools made debugging harder, but mostly I think because of all the emphasis — right from the start — on just how darn cool the typesetting was. It can't render inside just about any actual programming environment (editor or IDE) on this planet, and so we can't make changes to it while we work on the codebase.

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