Interesting to consider this in the light of how Knuth intends literate programming. Specifically, his version of "literate" is specifically dissecting the code for presentation. Sometimes you show broad strokes of the overall structure of the program you are presenting, but most of the time you dive into the details.

It is funny as most of the time the big complaint is that there is still code there. It is not uncommon for the code to start with a section showing a basic C file with some standard includes at the top. And those will sometimes just have a shorthand C comment embedded in them for why they are there. This seems to frustrate many that think the entire thing has to read like a novel, but it makes perfect sense in the "dissected program" presentation of the code.

There was a fun video I saw once of Knuth "critiquing" the code of his class. He called out liking the way first person was defined for use in the prose section and would spend time talking about the different stylistic choices of things. I'll have to try and find that again.