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I found the video did describe live programming quite a bit, but it was not clear to me how this was a merger with literate programming. In my journey into lit

I found the video did describe live programming quite a bit, but it was not clear to me how this was a merger with literate programming. In my journey into literate programming, a large portion of its benefits is being able to sculpt the story into a well-ordered fashion that works for humans. That is, I think of it as a path of stepping through the plan and into the details. In the talk, it seemed that the live portions would start with editing various final details with perhaps a literate description of the widget, but the widget's relation to other stuff seemed to be less present. This would be more like going up from the details and maybe up into a plan, a direction which I feel is rather typical non-literate programming. I do think that live programming is useful in literate programming, particularly in more stylistic choices (such as choosing font-sizes if programming up a document display system) and simply making the check of working speedier. What could be an interesting intersection of the live widget editing is if in editing a widget, the whole design hierarchy leading to that widget became visually available. In similar fashion, the widgets being in a hierarchy already would naturally create a placement for a new widget, encouraging higher level explanation of the widgets in the appropriate human story place while allowing for spur of the moment changes and additions. The biggest danger in literate programming is the same danger as in other programming styles: modifying the plan in mid-coding and not sufficiently documenting that.

brudgers 9y ago
There were some explicit examples early in the talk: the mention of Java Applets in web documents and the creation of inline buttons in StrongTalk. The discussion of WYSIWYG a bit further along seems somewhat related to the intersection of literate programming and interaction. My sense is Bracha's presentation asymptotes toward literate programming more from the programmer side versus from a starting point writing prose. My utterly unsubstantiated suspicion is that Knuth's asymptote was more from the direction of writing prose since a substantial proportion of the code he writes seems to be to be to support his prose writing habit...or to put it another way, Knuth seems to have a strong sense of self-identity as a writer as well as a programmer. But I could be wrong on both counts. Or to put it another way, one concept (among many valid concepts) of literate programming might be literate programming as writing about code with the intent that all the examples run as a meaningful program or library. That is as an extension of writing an article or book about programming. That's a bit different connotativel y from approaching literate programming as a different way of writing programs or libraries...even if the end artifacts of a prose document and source file(s) are logically similar.

brudgers 9y ago

There were some explicit examples early in the talk: the mention of Java Applets in web documents and the creation of inline buttons in StrongTalk. The discussion of WYSIWYG a bit further along seems somewhat related to the intersection of literate programming and interaction. My sense is Bracha's presentation asymptotes toward literate programming more from the programmer side versus from a starting point writing prose. My utterly unsubstantiated suspicion is that Knuth's asymptote was more from the direction of writing prose since a substantial proportion of the code he writes seems to be to be to support his prose writing habit...or to put it another way, Knuth seems to have a strong sense of self-identity as a writer as well as a programmer. But I could be wrong on both counts. Or to put it another way, one concept (among many valid concepts) of literate programming might be literate programming as writing about code with the intent that all the examples run as a meaningful program or library. That is as an extension of writing an article or book about programming. That's a bit different connotativel y from approaching literate programming as a different way of writing programs or libraries...even if the end artifacts of a prose document and source file(s) are logically similar.