Hacker News Reader

Comment by llm_trw | Hacker News Reader

>The fact that your literate code didn’t get touched says a lot.

The fact it's still used 5 years later without any of the code still being in production says more.

>To me the name Literate Programming implies that you write the code in a literate style from the outset.

This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to write. You should perhaps look at how people who do it for a living write books or articles. The final document has little to do with what you spend most your time editing.

I absolutely hacked on the tangled source code of the program when trying to fix bugs or extend capabilities. Once I knew what I wanted to do I put it back in the literate program, usually finding a lot more bugs in the process.

View on HN

> I absolutely hacked on the tangled source code of the program when trying to fix bugs or extend capabilities. Once I knew what I wanted to do I put it back in the literate program

Does NoWeb automate this "untangling" process in any way? I sometimes use Weave.jl [1] when I'm thinking out loud through code, and at times it would be nice to just work on the tangled code, refactor and reorganize things, and have it all untangle back into the original in some way. I have no idea how that would work though, and it would likely be pretty limited even if it existed, but I'm curious what the usual approach you take to this is.

[1] https://weavejl.mpastell.com/stable/

No, in noweb programs you insert chunks of code in multiple places and have conflicts when you try and automatically merge the code back too often.

Org mode has a function which does this, but they didn't allow for arbitrary chunk nesting the last time I looked.

Emacs has a number of very useful features in the modes for noweb/tex, one of which is jumping to the chunk which the code came from in the tangled source code on the pretty printed PDF. This follows the spirit of what you want. In fact SyncTeX support comes pretty much out of the box for noweb files and makes their editing a breeze, either as text or code.

Of course if you're not on Emacs than god help you.

Are you using the following workflow?

orgmode file --> export to pdf (aka weave)

orgmode file --> org babel tangle

Would you please help me understand your workflow for > jumping to the chunk which the code came from in the tangled source code on the pretty printed PDF

Do the codeblocks in your pdfs contain hyperlinks back to the org file where they came from?

No I'm using noweb. There is an option in noweb to add comments in the tangled code with the line and file from which they originate. Then there's an Emacs mode that let's you jump to that code. I wrote a little function that let you instead jump to the line in the same like in pdf using SyncTeX.

Perhaps I came across as too critical, I have a lot of respect for what you did and for the craft of technical writing. And I definitely understand that writing is not done linearly and is very iterative.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you were documenting existing code and that the result was very valuable as documentation, but not necessarily as code. You were acting as a technical writer not a programmer, it's a bit of a disconnect to call it Literate Programming, even if you were using Literate Programming tooling (NoWeb).

This kind of documentation is common practice all over industry and it is valued, but I don't think Literate Programming is considered to be widely adopted because of that.

I'm having a hard time even understanding what the question is here.

You seem to be confusing the tools with the work being done.

You can write a prototype of a C function in Python to see if you understand the requirements before you commit to the much harder task of writing it in C. That doesn't mean you're not writing a C program.

The same is true for literate programming. I can write code outside the main literate program when I'm not sure it's meant to do before I put it back in.

What I'm saying is simply that as you describe it, you are first writing the code normally, and then separately writing some documentation about it accompanied by code snippets for context.

But if that's Literate Programming then everyone is doing it and it's not a very meaningful label, it's just documentation.

I do get it, the distinction is that you are using NoWeb and you can convert between the documentation and the code, and that the documentation contains the entirety of the code. I suppose that's neat.

At some point, this boils down to a pointless discussion of semantics (my fault). "Literate Programming" as you describe it does not sound like a style of "Programming". Actually, when you reverse the Programming/Writing emphasis, it simply becomes "Technical Writing", which is what everyone does, because that's what's actually needed. And it is done by great writers rather than great programmers (which may describe Knuth, with the upmost respect).

I always interpreted it as writing the text and the code together, logging your thought process, thinking of code like a piece of literature as it is written, rather than adding some documentation to it later. The notion that writing it like this will yield better code, regardless of its value as documentation. I suppose that's why it was unproductive for me, it is a rather romantic interpretation (again, my fault).

You write it however you want.

I don't know how you code, but the first draft of code is never what ends up in the code base. Neither is the first draft of the documentation. You can write both together, but until you have an idea of what the structure of the code would look like, and how to split it up then you're better off doing multiple drafts.

As always code is read much more often than it is written and literate programming is used for the reading part, not the writing part. The efficiency comes in not having to guess what 0x5F3759DF is there for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com