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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 i
by 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 agoI would suggest it's just as rare to read a math book from start to finish...
- emodendroket 5y agoMaybe so, but the progression and unit size are closer to narrative books than to code.
- wudangmonk 5y agoI 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 agoWell, I agree that it makes a lot of sense as a pedagogic tool. But I thought the claim was more expansive than that.