101–110 of 112 posts
I think likewise. When I had to write the radix tree implementation for Redis I faced two problems: - I needed a stable implemention as soon as possible, I had a performance issued that needed to be solved by range queries. - The radix tree was full of corner cases. So I resorted to literate programming, which is in general very near to my usual programming style. You can find it in the rax.c file inside the Redis so…
I would go further: literate programming is not just "much more than" commenting code, because you can do LP without commenting much. The main thing in LP is the idea/orientation of writing as if you're writing something for a human reader. This does often lead to more comments, but even something like "here's the code" followed by lots of code can be LP, if you deem it sufficient for your intended audience. (Earlier…
I'm somewhat hopeful the growing ubiquity of especially Jupyter notebooks leads to better, more universal tools for literate programming. Notebooks have always been a form of literate programming. Jupyter and its underlying formats are now ubiquitous enough with a lot of strong IDE support (across a variety of IDEs) that I'm hopeful a better convergence as a "general literate programming platform" from the notebook s…
There's also "nbdev" (https://github.com/fastai/nbdev) which seems like it should be the best of both worlds, but I couldn't quite get it to work.
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For point 3. - it's exactly the same with code that's not literate. Writing code is ultimately about expressing ideas using a language, which is really much closer to writing a novel than to drawing a plan for a bridge. As such, if you want to make your code understandable to other, you have to learn to write well. Just like with novels, there's no problem with having a personal style, or a specific flavor that comes…
It's a nice perspective, but the fact that more people have read Fifty Shades/Twilight than the sum total of all who have read any of Charles Stross's works undercuts your point. And while you add to point 3, it wasn't my main point. Take any two exceptionally good writers who have very different styles. If one of them produces literate code, the other may be able to understand it very well, but it is unlikely that h…
> can modify it, along with the prose, and maintain the quality of the literate document.
for a living. As long as you're accomplished enough of a writer, you'll be able to analyze the works of others and copy them easily. It's coming up with your own style that's a problem.
To summarize: exceptionally good writers will be able to modify and expand each other's work without much effort. Or at least that's what I believe, based on some personal experiences with writing and writers. It should be quite similar with literate programming, too.
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You will be shocked to know that emacs and org-mode can do exactly this. You can tangle source, and go from the tangled source back to the section that generated that source. If you are wanting to just do cweb, then the debugging symbols already let you step through the source line by line without having to look at the tangled source.
> You will be shocked to know that emacs and org-mode can do exactly this. You can tangle source, and go from the tangled source back to the section that generated that source. If you actually use noweb and desire autocompletion or type reminders (or really anything an IDE does), then functionally it cannot. Literate programming (and noweb) is great for configs, but as set up it simply doesn't work right for real pro…
dabbrev completes noweb-ref names and you can automate this with yasnippet.
Are there any large (> 5 people teams) projects written with literate programming? Also are there any IDE plugins or error stack trace/debuggers for literate programming? I haven't really paid attention to literate programming in a long long time and I'm curious if the field has advanced. (Also I don't understand this: "A typical literate file produces many source files." Why? Why would you care about having multiple…
"Also are there any IDE plugins or error stack trace/debuggers for literate programming?" Good question! I always think it would be nice to just write Markdown sprinkled with code, but without IDE/editor support, it's dead in the water :(
Are there any large (> 5 people teams) projects written with literate programming? Also are there any IDE plugins or error stack trace/debuggers for literate programming? I haven't really paid attention to literate programming in a long long time and I'm curious if the field has advanced. (Also I don't understand this: "A typical literate file produces many source files." Why? Why would you care about having multiple…
IMHO the two biggest problems I find with existing tools are that they assume the documentation is the source of truth and that the tangling will leave artifacts in code. Both of these make them poorly suited to the sort of projects that most of us work on, I'm not Knuth writing a dead tree tome but I would like some better ways to add documentation to existing projects and have to integrate with others. I wrote a Po…
Leo avoids this by keeping a "shadow copy" of the artifacts or annotations and doing a diff on detangling between all 3 versions.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I didn't find his way of programming to be all that more useful than just having well written code. The small code snippets are labeled and shown where they are referenced but this seems to mimic the functionality of functions which, when using an IDE like Visual Studio, can have where it's referenced identified through tooling.
The original literate programming was designed for early programming languages like Pascal, where support for forward references would've gotten in the way of efficient parsing and compiling. As you point out, it's less useful nowadays and it's been largely superseded by "lightweight" literate systems where formatted and structured documentation is programmatically extracted from the code rather than the converse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a nice perspective, but the fact that more people have read Fifty Shades/Twilight than the sum total of all who have read any of Charles Stross's works undercuts your point. And while you add to point 3, it wasn't my main point. Take any two exceptionally good writers who have very different styles. If one of them produces literate code, the other may be able to understand it very well, but it is unlikely that h…
I believe you're wrong - writers can, and do, steal styles and ideas from each other all the time. Not to mention, the editors are basically doing this: > can modify it, along with the prose, and maintain the quality of the literate document. for a living. As long as you're accomplished enough of a writer, you'll be able to analyze the works of others and copy them easily. It's coming up with your own style that's a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you're wrong - writers can, and do, steal styles and ideas from each other all the time. Not to mention, the editors are basically doing this: > can modify it, along with the prose, and maintain the quality of the literate document. for a living. As long as you're accomplished enough of a writer, you'll be able to analyze the works of others and copy them easily. It's coming up with your own style that's a…
Doubt u get what beetle said. It is far more work to rewrite an essay with a different thesis.
I would be happy to know, how experienced are you with actually writing creative works, working with a text, working on editing it, and so on? Again, I'm not 100% sure if literate programming would be exactly the same, but if it is similar to creative writing, then - I stand by this point - personal style of writing is not a problem. For two reasons:
- it's trivial to adjust your writing to an existing style when doing light editing and small extensions
- it doesn't matter if different stories in an anthology are written in different styles (actually, you buy anthologies because of different styles), so big extensions and rewrites in a different style are also ok