The Tears of Donald Knuth (2015)

> not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

Aren't Asimov's Multivac stories basicaly this? Humans build a powerful computer with a conversational interface helping them doing all kind of science and stuff, then before they know they become Multivac's pets.

I don't know why but it makes me smile that he did this experiment by having a grad student type the questions for chatgpt and copy the results.

That link is great!

Knuth has a beautiful way of writing systematically (as can be expected of the inventor of "Literate Programming").

That's related. Thank you for posting it.

But what does Knuth think of "vibe coding" or "agentic coding"?

What does he think of "The Dawn of the Dark Ages of Computer Programming"?

I don't see the connection.

In literate programming you meticulously write code (as usual) but present it to a human reader as an essay: as a web of code chunks connected together in a well-defined manner with plenty of informal comments describing your thinking process and the "story" of the program. You write your program but also structure it for other humans to read and to understand.

LLM software development tends to abandon human understanding. It tends to abandon tight abstractions that manage complexity.

It couldn't be further away from Literate programming. If anything we should call it illiterate programming.

The irony is that if we had been writing literate programs instead of "normal" programs, from 1984 to 2026, then LLMs may actually have been much better at programming in 2026, than they turned out to be. Literate programs entwine the program code with prose-explanations of that code, while also cross-referencing all dependent code of each chunk. In some sense they make fancy IDEs and editors and LSPs unnecessary, because it is all there in the PDF. They also separate the code from the presentation of the code, meaning that you don't really have to worry about the small layout-details of your code. They even have aspects of version control (Knuth advocates keeping old code inside the literate program, and explaining why you thought it would work and why it does not, and what you replaced it with).

LLMs do not bring us closer to literate programming any more than version-control-systems or IDEs or code-comments do. All of these support-technologies exist because the software industry simply couldn't be disciplined enough to learn how to program in the literate style. And it is hard to want to follow this discipline when 95% of the code that you write, is going to be thrown away, or is otherwise built on a shaky foundation.

Another "problem" with literate programming is that it does not scale by number of contributors. It really is designed for a lone programmer who is setting out to solve an interesting yet difficult problem, and who then needs to explain that solution to colleagues, instead of trying to sell it in the marketplace.

And even if literate programming _did_ scale by number of contributors, very few contributors are good at both programming _and_ writing (even the plain academic writing of computer scientists). In fact Bentley told Knuth (in the 80s) that, "2% of people are good at programming, and 2% of people are good at writing -- literate programming requires a person to be good at both" (so only about 0.04% of the adult population would be capable of doing it).

By the way, Knuth said in a book (Coders at Work, I believe): "If I can program it, then I can understand it." The literate paradigm is about understanding. If you do not program it, and if _you_ do not explain the _choices_ that _you_ made during the programming, then you are not understanding it -- you are just making a computer do _something_, that may or may not be the thing that you want (which is fine, most people use computers in this way: but that makes you a user and not a programmer). When LLMs write large amounts of code for you, you are not programming. And when LLMs explain code for you, you are not programming. You are struggling to not drown in a constantly churning code-base that is being modified a dozen times per day by a bunch of people, some of whom you do not know, many of whom are checked out and are trying to get through their day, and all of whom know that it does not matter because they will hop jobs in one or two or three years, and all their bad decisions become someone else's problem.

Just because LLMs can translate one string of tokens into a different string of tokens, while you are programming does not make them "literate". When I read a Knuthian literate program, I see, not a description of what the code does, but a description what it is supposed to do (and why that is interesting), and how a person reasoned his/her way to a solution, blind-alleys and all. The writer of the literate program anticipates the next question, before I even have it, and anticipates what might be confusing, and phrases it in a few ways.

As the creator of the Axiom math software said: the goal of Literate Programming, is to be able to hire an engineer, give him a 500 page book that contains the entire literate program, send him on a 2 week vacation to Hawaii, and have him come back with whole program in his head. If anything LLMs are making this _less_ of a possibility.

In an industry dominated by deadline-obsessed pseudo-programmers creating for a demo-obsessed audience of pseudo-customers, we cannot possibly create software in a high-quality literate style (no, not even with LLMs, even if they got 10x better _and_ 10x cheaper).

Lamport (of Paxos, Byzantine Generals, Bakery Algo, TLA+), made LaTeX and TLA+, with the intent that they be used together, in the same way that CWEB literate programs are. All of these tools (CWEB, TeX, LaTeX, TLA+), are meant to encourage clear and precise thinking at the level of _code_ and the level of _intent_. This is what makes literate programs (and TLA+ specs) conceptually crisp and easily communicable. Just look at the TLA+ spec for OpenRTOS. Their real time OS is a fraction of the size that it would have been if they had implemented it in the industry-standard way, and it has the nice property of being correct.

Literate Programming, by design, is for creating something that _lasts_, and that has value when executed on the machine and in the mind. LLMs (which are being slowly co-opted by the Agile consulting crowd), are (currently) for the exact opposite: they are for creating something that is going to be worthless after the demo.

Past progress in software engineering is a tower of well-defined abstractions.

Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code.

Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals.

This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks.

That era is ending.

An hour later. Wow that was quite a rabbit hole, I return a fan of Tom 7, surfing the edge of mad genius. http://tom7.org/

He’s still here. In fact, in December he gave his annual Christmas lecture, and last month he was a guest at a Computer History Museum event.

Excited? I doubt that. I'm guessing you haven't read his books.

Hopefully some are visionary enough to be dismayed that the endgame of their field is the acceleration of slop and fraud, the end of customer service, and the end of the reading of full, original documents.

I can't imagine being excited about any of that unless I was trying to make money from it.

I tend to agree with Knuth - technical history is extremely valuable to both practitioners and researchers in computing, and there isn't enough of it.

While it is understandable that computing practitioners and researchers want to look forward to the next "new" thing rather than backward to "old" things, ignoring computing history means that we are often reinventing the wheel, repeating old mistakes, etc., all while lacking an understanding of how and why things are the way they are today. And perhaps missing out on a great deal of fun and intellectual engagement as well.

Fortunately is some activity in terms of writing up and analyzing the technical history of computing, and I certainly appreciate the work of the CHM, journals like Annals of the History of Computing, the work of retrocomputing hobbyists, and the work of the scholars mentioned in the article. But (as the article notes) there are few economic and career incentives - in history or in computing - to produce this important work.

The article validates Knuth with these statements:

> For different reasons, outlined below, neither group has shown much interest in supporting work of the kind favored by Knuth. That is why it has rarely been written.

> Most of this new work is aimed primarily at historians, philosophers, or science studies specialists rather than computer scientists

> Work of the particular kind preferred by Knuth will flourish only if his colleagues in computer science are willing to produce, reward, or commission it.

The second part of this last sentence isn't wrong, but sidesteps the first point. One might similarly criticize history departments for failing to reward or commission technological literacy.

*practitioners - too late to fix typo