Moldable Development is different from Literate Programming in at least two ways: - Literate Programming is focused on a single narrative. In contrast, a system can be seen in many ways. - Literate Programming has a fixed environment, and mixes text and code. In contrast, Moldable Development emphasizes the importance of the tool as an essential artifact through which to explain the system.
While Literate Programming does talk about explaining systems, I find it too limiting. Instead, we start from the observation that figuring systems out to know what to do next is the single most expensive activity in software engineering; thus it's more interesting to regard software engineering as a decision making activity about an ever changing system. This stands in contrast to the pervasive idea of software engineering as a construction activity. Optimizing for decision making leads to a new set of practices that are not an increment compared to what those typical used today.
Glamorous Toolkit looks odd exactly because we optimized for something else that others disregard.