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Direct link to the discussed Cafe au Life, for those that haven't already seen it: http://raganwald.github.com/cafeaulife/docs/cafeaulife.html http://raganwald.

Direct link to the discussed Cafe au Life, for those that haven't already seen it: http://raganwald.github.com/cafeaulife/docs/cafeaulife.html http://raganwald.github.com/cafeaulife/docs/cafeaulife.html And in terms of the gist of Reg's essay, I think the single line that best cuts to the heart of it is: "[...] while David presents the concepts of literate programming and elegant programming as a dichotomy, I think they're orthogonal." Bingo. @raganwald: I'd be curious to hear more about what sort of "literate programming tool that transforms the source directly" you were hankering for. Not CWEB style?

raganwald 15y ago
I’m not entirely sure. But just looking at Cafe au Life, I’d like to be able to look at the “tangled” code where all of the code for a Square is in the Square class, and a ‘cross-cutting-concern’ view where all the code for something like import and export is kept together, whether it applies to Cell or Square. Comes down to traditional OOP being a tree formed by belongs-to relationships between entities and responsibilities, but Cafe au Life having a many-to-many relationship. p.s. What are your thoughts on Cafe au Life? Is this (In Your Humble Opinion) idiomatic CoffeeScript? Is this how you envisioned Docco being used? Feedback most welcome...
swannodette 15y ago
I didn't actually quite present them as a dichotomy. My point was a bit subtler than that in my opinion. In fact it was less about the practice of literate programming than problems of context in many programming languages. An aspect I didn't discuss is that when we write in English the usefulness of the text is then subject to the ability of the author to write clear, logical, concise (hopefully beautiful & elegant) English. So it's not surprising, to me at least, that the best literate programs I've read are not online but in books.

raganwald 15y ago

I’m not entirely sure. But just looking at Cafe au Life, I’d like to be able to look at the “tangled” code where all of the code for a Square is in the Square class, and a ‘cross-cutting-concern’ view where all the code for something like import and export is kept together, whether it applies to Cell or Square. Comes down to traditional OOP being a tree formed by belongs-to relationships between entities and responsibilities, but Cafe au Life having a many-to-many relationship. p.s. What are your thoughts on Cafe au Life? Is this (In Your Humble Opinion) idiomatic CoffeeScript? Is this how you envisioned Docco being used? Feedback most welcome...

swannodette 15y ago

I didn't actually quite present them as a dichotomy. My point was a bit subtler than that in my opinion. In fact it was less about the practice of literate programming than problems of context in many programming languages. An aspect I didn't discuss is that when we write in English the usefulness of the text is then subject to the ability of the author to write clear, logical, concise (hopefully beautiful & elegant) English. So it's not surprising, to me at least, that the best literate programs I've read are not online but in books.