Literate programming—or LP—is one of those things that represent some utopian way of Building Shit™, promising that you will be elevated to some higher level of being. Or something. Just like purely-functional-programming or the borrow checker. It fixes bugs! Makes you a better programmer! And yet, even without such qualifications, this concept has always fascinated me. Essentially, it's the formalization of every single "code tutorial". As I say, it's literally "code, but pretend you are writing a tutorial on how to do it". Hell, people point to Physically Based Rendering as an example of "LP done right". Most modern day conceptions of LP involve some sort of notebook, like Jupyter Notebook. Don't get me wrong, those are great. The fact that you can see output of some piece of code from the get-go is very helpful for understanding in a way not so easily achieved by traditional LP. But "trad LP" is the slightly more interesting formulation of Donald Knuth (you might know him from…
No comments yet. Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here.