I think one "unfortunate" side effect of literate programming with a "stupid" procedual language like C, Pascal or even Java - is that your lp system tends towa

I think one "unfortunate" side effect of literate programming with a "stupid" procedual language like C, Pascal or even Java - is that your lp system tends toward becoming your macro system. It does allow straightforward, short procedual/structured programs to become very readable and easily understandable - but for bigger "piles of code" - it's probably not that good a fit in practice. I guess https://github.com/daly/axiom https://github.com/daly/axiom is both an argument for this being true (I seem to recall there was an effort to get away from lp) - and against (proof of existence: it's a big system, it's old, it seems to not be dead). Then there's the other thing - I don't recall who's quote it is - but it is along the lines of: "There are few good programmers, there are few good writers of prose/technical documentation - therefore the subset of people that are both great programmers and great writers are tiny - and that is the subset for whom literate programming is a great fit". I do think there's a middle ground though, and "notebooks" for "executable, repeatable" research papers is one such middle ground (or: to write a great cs paper your team need to have both skills anyway). But there are certainly great programmers that can't write documentation on how to escape a wet paper bag.