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I hero-worship Knuth as much as anyone, but that document is frankly terrible. Take a look at section 6. There's a flowery sentence that says no more than "Ad
by efaref 10y ago
I hero-worship Knuth as much as anyone, but that document is frankly terrible.
Take a look at section 6. There's a flowery sentence that says no more than "Add word to vocabulary" (completely pointless if this were a method called "add_word" on a class named "Vocabulary") and then a dense chunk of completely unexplained code.
- habitue 10y agoI think the issue is treating Knuth's literate programming examples as received wisdom, or the pinnacle of the form, rather than as a pioneering effort by someone very talented, but done without the benefit of a developed culture around the practice. He makes mistakes we have memes now for (e.g. "explain why not how", useless comments for imports). I think if literate programming takes off, we'll see the form surpassing Knuth quickly