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Comment by diskzero | Hacker News Reader

Jupyter Notebooks have been been so amazingly valuable to me. Would anyone consider them to be an example of literate programming? If so, are they the most successful example out there?

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In my article about Pluto¹, which is an evolution of the Jupyter concept specific to Julia, I said that these notebooks “may be a way to realize Donald Knuth's concept of literate programming.”.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/835930/

OK Lee, Pluto is one of the cooler things I have seen recently. I am going to dive in more deeply.

Gilad Bracha has also been going in this direction with his recent work on Newspeak and literate programming.

Is this how Smalltalk is finally going to gain adoption?

Oh wow, I just realized that Pluto's ability to track dependencies—and thus cells could be written "out of order"—would also fulfill Knuth's idea of code being presented in an order more ideal for humans to read, that is different from execution order.

They're a possible vehicle for literate programming, but I don't know that I'd call them the best vehicle. Using notebooks to build a stand-alone application would be awkward at best.

The current space to watch for literate programming seems to be Racket.

Good point. I have taught classes using DrRacket, so I suppose what might be needed is a web-based interface as well. I see similar limitations with Swift Playgrounds. They are great as long as you have a Mac, installed XCode, etc. I don't want to say it was a struggle to get students to install DrRacket, but a web interface like Observable, maybe Pluto, etc. is hard to compete against

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