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I don't get the association between reading and literature. Math books can be read, are there Math book reading clubs? now take away all the context and just le

I don't get the association between reading and literature. Math books can be read, are there Math book reading clubs? now take away all the context and just leave the equations, that would be code. I don't known about others but I need to actually do the math to understand a math book and those always include the context.

emodendroket 5y ago
I’d say the notion of “curling up with a book” strongly evokes literature. And calling it “literate” programming invites the comparison as well. But a program isn’t like a math book either. It is actually pretty rare to actually just read a program start to finish.
- couchand 5y ago
  I would suggest it's just as rare to read a math book from start to finish...
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Maybe so, but the progression and unit size are closer to narrative books than to code.
- wudangmonk 5y ago
  I understand what Knuth means by literate programming and I personally like doing it for some pieces of my code so that a few months later I understand what I was thinking at the time and either continue or change things because I now know better. The same way one might write their mind in a journal and cringe at the content years later. Seibel seems to have taken the literate part of literate-programming too literately with his reading club and not expecting to implement at least a toy version of the code to understand it. This is why I compared it to a math book, in that it is also a book that is read but to really understand something one must work out some of the problems. I did not mean that a program is like a math book, I meant that a literate-program is like a math book because it adds some context to the math inside. I think a program itself is like math with no context where you have to reverse engineer what its doing by guessing what the person who wrote it was trying to do.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well, I agree that it makes a lot of sense as a pedagogic tool. But I thought the claim was more expansive than that.

emodendroket 5y ago

I’d say the notion of “curling up with a book” strongly evokes literature. And calling it “literate” programming invites the comparison as well. But a program isn’t like a math book either. It is actually pretty rare to actually just read a program start to finish.

couchand 5y ago
I would suggest it's just as rare to read a math book from start to finish...
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Maybe so, but the progression and unit size are closer to narrative books than to code.
wudangmonk 5y ago
I understand what Knuth means by literate programming and I personally like doing it for some pieces of my code so that a few months later I understand what I was thinking at the time and either continue or change things because I now know better. The same way one might write their mind in a journal and cringe at the content years later. Seibel seems to have taken the literate part of literate-programming too literately with his reading club and not expecting to implement at least a toy version of the code to understand it. This is why I compared it to a math book, in that it is also a book that is read but to really understand something one must work out some of the problems. I did not mean that a program is like a math book, I meant that a literate-program is like a math book because it adds some context to the math inside. I think a program itself is like math with no context where you have to reverse engineer what its doing by guessing what the person who wrote it was trying to do.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well, I agree that it makes a lot of sense as a pedagogic tool. But I thought the claim was more expansive than that.