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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

Apart from Donald Knuth, you are the first person that I heard from who used literate programming professionally. Would be great to learn more from your experiences, good and bad, if you every fancy writing about it.

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I've also used it fairly extensively, both in academia and in industry jobs (using Emacs org-mode, with several target languages, often combined). I found it very useful when thinking through a problem, and as documentation for myself later on. At some point it starts to become a bit unwieldy. Nowadays, most of my work is in Clojure, and I find that the literate workflow gets in the way of REPL-driven development, so I haven't been using it as much lately.

Overall, I'd highly recommend it.

Thanks. We did discuss this on HN a few years ago and I added a few comments, starting here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048693

I continued to work on that project for a while afterwards, but I don’t think my overall views on the pros and cons of the literate style changed much from what I wrote there.

If there’s anything you’re particularly curious about, I’m happy to discuss further (though my professional experience was limited to that one project, so I’m hardly an expert).

One thing which might help with "scannability" is to have a toggle in the LaTeX code which changes it from focusing on displaying the document as a typeset whole to showing only the typeset code. A possible way to do this would be change the width of the page so that the text lines are so wide each paragraph would only be a single line, then you could set the PDF view to only be the width of the widest code line at the left edge.

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