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Comment by Davidnkt89 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I wrote a literate programming preprocessor in Haskell[0], and used it to weave/tangle a D-Bus implementation (also in Haskell). The woven PDF[1] weighs in around 90 pages.

I'll quote from the linked page regarding my conclusions:

------------>8----------

But in the end, I was never able to realize the promised benefits of Literate Programming. The typeset PDF was not easier to read than hypertext documentation generated by Haddock, and both were obviously worse than the very nice docs being created by the Python community with Sphinx.

So in mid 2012 (~3 years after starting the project) I removed all the literate annotations and styles, dropped the fancy build scripts, and released haskell-dbus 0.10 as standard Haskell.

------------>8----------

I'm sure an expert in LaTeX could do a better job with the formatting, and with the benefit of 10 additional years of experience there are some design decisions I would do differently in the code, but even so I think it was a reasonably effortful attempt.

I've never felt any urge to try Literate Programming again.

[0] https://john-millikin.com/software/anansi#history

[1] https://github.com/jmillikin/haskell-dbus/releases/download/...

I really hope that "--->8---" catches on here as a way to quote an extract from something nicely :)

The actual size may change a lot depending on the font, but there’s a nice Unicode symbol for that:

——— <redacted> ———

Update: apparently HN doesn’t like some characters…

Anyway these are the characters: https://unicode.org/charts/nameslist/n_2700.html

- 2700 Black Safety Scissors

- 2701 Upper Blade Scissors

- 2702 Black Scissors

- 2703 Lower Blade Scissors

- 2704 White Scissors

Oh that's neat, but I've no problem using the little emoticon style 8< or >8

Cute fleurons.

I have often thought about implementing a simple Makefile alternative in a literate style. Almost like an executable README.md. This way you can describe the project and the ways to interact with it in a much more readable way than a Makefile.

> Almost like an executable README.md

Previously:

> There is a way to write a plain text file so that it looks the same (i.e. appears as plain text) whether it has the .txt extension when it's opened in a text editor and/or Web browser versus whether you rename it to have a browser-associated file extension like .htm or .html and then re-open it in a Web browser.

Why is this relevant? Because:

> Documents opened Web browsers are programmable.

From <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35389974>

> If folks were really committed to improving the developer experience, then instead of what we do now [...] development would work like this: ¶1. Download the project source tree ¶2. Open README.html ¶3. Drag and drop the project source onto README.html

From <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28407936>

Yes! We are on the same wavelength. I am a big fan of viewing the web browser optionally as an offline tool for being basically a strong target for scriptable document and multimedia experiences.

That said, this approach only works for projects that themselves target the browser, since the loaded script would be unable to execute commands outside of the browser (without some kind of companion application which runs a web server locally).

I wonder if HN needs a "Flag as AI-generated" feature.

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