Literate Programming: Articles • Hacker News Board

Re: Literate Programming: Articles

#71

Post by ParetoOptimal » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 4:30 PM UTC

mncharity wrote: post #51

FWIW, I note emacs polymode's[1] poly-markdown, and pandoc's ast json dumps[2]. For decades, I searched for literate tooling for personal projects, but nothing stuck. Something about the design space seems to make it easy to hit design choices that are uncomfortable fits for one's use case, or personal taste, or preferences for tooling extension and customization. It reminds me of the personal information manager spa…

Do you mind sharing your comparison of polymode versus org-mode for literate programming?

Re: Literate Programming: Articles

#72

Post by cxr » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 12:22 AM UTC

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #70

taeric wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure that trying to not have boilerplate of any kind is a worthy goal. Consider, no book is wanting to get rid of the title page. Even a dedication page has grown to be a near required page that we literally teach students to write. To that end, the goal is to not have parts that can be the same between programs vary. That has pedagogical value. Is a type of stability that we don't really value much…

> I'm not entirely sure that trying to not have boilerplate of any kind is a worthy goal. I think it's a worthy goal for nearly all readers. However I also believe that literate programmers should be written with many different readers in mind. So you could have one version that is written in a "typical code" style like: * library 1 ** module 1 *** source file 1 ** module 2 *** source file 2 That doesn't need to be w…

People will inevitably complain that what you're advocating for involves too much duplication, but I've independently reached the same conclusion that you have. Besides, in a good LP system, the toolchain would be able to consume the second part and transform and emit the first part.

See also this conversation about the unreadability of Knuth's .web files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29203798#29205840>

Re: Literate Programming: Articles

#73

Post by cxr » Tue, Jun 06, 2023, 12:27 AM UTC

svat wrote: post #66

cxr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, writing is always (best) done with a specific reader in mind: you assume the reader has a certain background/prerequisites: some things that don't need explaining, and some things that do. I don't buy it. The same explanation can be used to excuse the use of traditional (non-LP) programming systems—raising questions about why make a fuss about LP at all at that point if an LP text is going to treat the same ty…

I was thinking of this again this weekend, after spending a couple of hours reading some literate programs again, in light of Knuth's recent (via https://twitter.com/ksmeel/status/1661890306370072576 ) note https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/cvm-note.pdf and associated program https://shreevatsa.github.io/knuth-literate-programs/program... , a CWEB program he wrote a few days ago. It's been 9–10 days here and I'm…

> It's been 9–10 days here and I'm not sure anyone will read this (I'm surprised HN still lets me reply)

HN gives you 14 days.

(I wish it had a feature to "mark" a comment in lieu of writing a reply then and there. When 12 or 13 days have passed, it'd send you an email reminding you that this is your last chance to add what you have to say to the record. In this way, it would favor people going away and coming back to leave more thoughtful comments instead of impelling them to reply instantaneously i.e. to avoid the risk of not being heard.)

I suppose the hack would be to set your delay in your profile to 60 × 24 × 12.5 = 18000 (minutes), post your reply, then reset it to its initial value. You'd progressively edit your comment as the opportunity comes up, and then it will be autoposted in whatever form its in when the delay elapses. You can only edit posts for up to an hour (or something), though, and I'm not sure whether that timer starts from the time you hit submit or when it appears in the comments (i.e. after the delay has elapsed).