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Every few years, I contemplate the idea of trying out literate programming. I get that notebooks have continued to trends of "mixing prose and code" to great su

Every few years, I contemplate the idea of trying out literate programming. I get that notebooks have continued to trends of "mixing prose and code" to great success ; however, I really wonder how the "out of order programming" works out in practice. Sadly, I never managed to go passed the "my editor cannot show syntax highlighting for a mix of languages." :/

iib 3y ago
This is doable in Emacs, using org-mode and org-babel.
- phtrivier 3y ago
  You're right, I should have mentioned org-babel as the closest thing to something that would work for me. However, as soon as I start using noweb syntax for "out of order" programming, I stumble into long standing bugs (references are not always found, links in the tangled code are broken, detangling does not work, etc...)
wolfgang42 3y ago
Not sure what editor you use, but most syntax highlighters these days can mix languages: you see this e.g. in HTML <style> tags and Markdown fenced code blocks. As for 'out of order programming', I think that TANGLE-style reordering is a lot less important with modern programming languages: they don't do one-pass compilation and so can deal with forward references. Note that most of the cross-references in Knuth's program could be replaced with function calls or constant names, rather than the semiautomatic inlining that WEB performs. I've had some success in writing literate programs in a Markdown file, with a small script to extract the code blocks into a file for execution. This seems to work fine, at least on a small scale, and is very easy to implement and then extend if needed. Edit: and by “small script” I mean: import sys code = False for line in sys.stdin.read().splitlines(): if line == '```': code = False # End block if code: print(line) # Only output block contents if line == '```md': code = True # Start block It also seems worth noting that you can get much the same result just by writing a lot of comments; this technique is mainly useful when you also want more formatting than can be reasonably squeezed into plain text. /edit

iib 3y ago

This is doable in Emacs, using org-mode and org-babel.

phtrivier 3y ago
You're right, I should have mentioned org-babel as the closest thing to something that would work for me. However, as soon as I start using noweb syntax for "out of order" programming, I stumble into long standing bugs (references are not always found, links in the tangled code are broken, detangling does not work, etc...)

wolfgang42 3y ago

Not sure what editor you use, but most syntax highlighters these days can mix languages: you see this e.g. in HTML <style> tags and Markdown fenced code blocks. As for 'out of order programming', I think that TANGLE-style reordering is a lot less important with modern programming languages: they don't do one-pass compilation and so can deal with forward references. Note that most of the cross-references in Knuth's program could be replaced with function calls or constant names, rather than the semiautomatic inlining that WEB performs. I've had some success in writing literate programs in a Markdown file, with a small script to extract the code blocks into a file for execution. This seems to work fine, at least on a small scale, and is very easy to implement and then extend if needed. Edit: and by “small script” I mean: import sys code = False for line in sys.stdin.read().splitlines(): if line == '```': code = False # End block if code: print(line) # Only output block contents if line == '```md': code = True # Start block It also seems worth noting that you can get much the same result just by writing a lot of comments; this technique is mainly useful when you also want more formatting than can be reasonably squeezed into plain text. /edit