Literate programming can be done in any language. Here is an example in HTML: http://axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/litprog.html http://axiom-developer.org/a

Literate programming can be done in any language. Here is an example in HTML: http://axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/litprog.html http://axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/litprog.html In addition to the benefits mentioned there are at least 3 others I can site. First, since you spend time explaining why you are writing the code and your thoughts on the design and implementation you naturally discover edge cases, missing cases, and bugs. As a result, the quality of the code is higher. Second, if you program in a team that does code reviews, the team can see your approach to the solution and the reasons. They can critique your work at a more profound level. If the code review happens before accepting the change commit, the quality of the code is higher. Third, code lives. Sourceforge is a gravesite of hundreds of thousands of programs that have died because the authors are no longer maintaining the code. New users are confronted with a source tree of tiny files which they are unable to understand and therefore unable to modify and maintain. I have the "hawaii test" criteria. If you can hire a new developer, give them your program, send them on a 2 week, all expense paid vacation to hawaii, and when they return they can modify and maintain the program as well as the original authors, then you have a fully literate program. As for the question of debugging, I find that it is no different. Generally the source of bugs are the same (e.g. using copy/paste and failing to properly fix the copy). Literate development, for me, takes on two different styles depending on the language. In a language that allows a read-eval-print loop, like lisp, it is trivial to work in emacs with a command line in one buffer and the literate sources in another buffer. You just point at the changed code and evaluate it immediately in the other buffer. It is very productive. In a language like Java that is a pure compile environment I create a makefile that extracts the code from the literate document into the proper com.foo.baz.... source tree, compiles the code, and runs the test regression suite. This generally takes less than a minute or two for most reasonably sized Java programs. So I make a small set of changes, save the buffer, run 'make', and see if the tests pass. For TDD programming I find this works very well. My last large program was 60000 lines of Lisp in a latex literate file. Tex'ing the file with all of the literate documentation generated 6000 pages. The technology scales quite well. Learning literate programming is like learning lisp. You keep wondering why anyone would program this way until you suddenly "get it". Once that happens you wonder why anyone could program any other way. Tim Daly