I don't think this is right. In Knuth's own words at the top of his site: "The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human bei

I don't think this is right. In Knuth's own words at the top of his site: "The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer." (https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html) This is the consistent message I've gotten from his writings: the goal is to communicate to other people. "Transformation of source code into a document that can be read like a book" feels far more low-level than that. > Knuth wrote WEB in 1981, ten years before the web. There's no way he could have known at the time that hyperlinks and search would be a far more useful interaction model for reference documentation. Knuth certainly knew about hyperlinks. On the same page, Knuth says: "The program is also viewed as a hypertext document, rather like the World Wide Web. (Indeed, I used the word WEB for this purpose long before CERN grabbed it!)" There's a pleasing non-linearity to Knuth's creations, both in the source (with fragments being named and referring to each other) and in typeset form (with all the attention to the index of fragments, to showing with each fragment all the places that refer to it). --- In any case, we may be splitting hairs here. I'm not a scholar of Knuth's work, and maybe your interpretation is correct. I agree that if you define Literate Programming as "transformation of source code into a document that can be read [linearly] like a book", then that goal is not useful. If you define it as "better communicating programs to other people," then I think that goal is still relevant. All programmers should keep this goal in mind, while loosening their grips a tad on the precise details of how they happen to aim for the goal at a specific point in time. There's still lots of room for improvement.