`org-mode` has the ability to evaluate code blocks and store the output in a following results block[0].

You can configure it to run just about everything in various ways and therefore you can do Literate Programming in nearly the full Knuth sense in it.

I find it's a good solution for a local "notebook" similar to IPython/Jupyter Notebooks but for any language in Emacs.

[0] https://orgmode.org/manual/Evaluating-Code-Blocks.html

Org mode provides a supercharged version of this functionality that will work for any language as long as you can point it to an appropriate runtime. It's definitely a little more verbose, since you have to declare the language and stuff inside the org mode syntax, but I'm sure that you could get it to work ad-hoc with a little hacking.

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

There is lively.el [1]! It is also on MELPA in a more recent version [2]. It allows to put an elisp expression into any buffer and then replaces that with the output in a time interval or manually. I use that frequently.

[1] https://lukego.livejournal.com/23379.html [2] https://github.com/purcell/lively/tree/348675828c6a81bfa1ac3...

https://blog.sulami.xyz/posts/literate-calc-mode/ is pretty nice. I always have literate-calc-minor-mode (+org-mode as major) in my scratch buffer for quick calculations.

Related: http://angg.twu.net/eepitch.html#test-blocks