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The talk rjlipton described was from the late 70s though, so it may have predated the idea of literate programming. The quote in primodemus' comment shows that
by vilhelm_s 16y ago
The talk rjlipton described was from the late 70s though, so it may have predated the idea of literate programming.
The quote in primodemus' comment shows that Knuth didn't in fact use the idea of literate programming in his first version of TeX, and he still wrote it in one go on paper ignoring the usual methodology. So maybe "he's a genius" is the right explanation after all.
- jsyedidia 16y agoHe certainly is a genius, and you're right that the first version of TeX was not written using literate programming tools; he planned it out on paper instead and programmed it using SAIL. He had a nasty bootstrapping problem since he needed TeX to exist before he could write a first version of WEB. But once he had a first version of TeX (TeX78), he built WEB, and then he re-wrote TeX from scratch (TeX82) in a different programming language (Pascal/WEB instead of SAIL).