Ah I see, thanks for clarifying. I had missed the subtle distinction in your comment between "interact with" and "read": I treated them as synonymous, when in f

Ah I see, thanks for clarifying. I had missed the subtle distinction in your comment between "interact with" and "read": I treated them as synonymous, when in fact you were referring to the interaction that is confined to actively editing (i.e., for Knuth, "typing up" the edits he has already made on paper). About the more perfect LP system, I agree it would be nice if the input format was designed to be the suitable way to read programs: in other words, there would be no "weave" step. [Aside: should this input format be plain text? Maybe notebooks like Wolfram's or "nbdev" count?] The idea of having the markup in the comments is instead related to eliminating the "tangle" step. (I think there are some LP-related tools that do this; one I know is Harold Thimbleby's "warp": http://www.harold.thimbleby.net/cv/files/warp.pdf http://www.harold.thimbleby.net/cv/files/warp.pdf — but the structured comments are in (ugh) XML. See also Visual Studio's XML comments…. He also has a later "relit" that does "reverse" LP, extracting source code out of the intended-for-publication format.) (These goals are indeed sort of opposites, but can be reconciled: I guess we can agree that the ultimate would be a format that eliminated both the tangle and weave steps!) (My reason for wishing eliminating the "tangle" step (and/or enabling going back from the tangled document to the LP input format) is simply an acknowledgement of network effects: LP is unlikely to ever catch on enough to be the majority, so there needs to be a way for a random programmer using their preferred IDE/editor to edit a "literate" program without getting too annoyed.) I read Raskin's article and it has good complaints about IDEs, and (although I don't see a close connection) I think I understand what you're suggesting as the ideal language/programming environment. But for me, because of the "LP will never be mainstream" belief, I'm still thinking of targeting mainstream languages, with "code" and "comments". :-) Anyway, this part from Raskin's article is particularly inspiring and quotable: > …the result was very readable and maintainable. To achieve this, we had regular code-reading sessions in which one programmer read and commented on each piece of code written by another programmer. In addition, an expert documenter/writer worked alongside the programmers. If he did not understand a piece of code, he would interview the programmers until he could write a cogent explanation. > Incidentally, many bugs and conceptual errors were discovered during this process, which more than paid for itself in decreased debugging time. Some programmers balked at the procedures at first, but all came to be enthusiastic when the project did not slow or founder as completion neared. The project was on time, on budget, and bugless (meaning that the software was released commercially to tens of thousands of users and produced no bug reports).