4 ms·
Apart from Donald Knuth, you are the first person that I heard from who used literate programming professionally. Would be great to learn more from your experie
by jll29 2y ago
Apart from Donald Knuth, you are the first person that I heard from who used literate programming professionally. Would be great to learn more from your experiences, good and bad, if you every fancy writing about it.
- Chris_Newton 2y agoThanks. We did discuss this on HN a few years ago and I added a few comments, starting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048693 I continued to work on that project for a while afterwards, but I don’t think my overall views on the pros and cons of the literate style changed much from what I wrote there. If there’s anything you’re particularly curious about, I’m happy to discuss further (though my professional experience was limited to that one project, so I’m hardly an expert).
- WillAdams 2y agoOne thing which might help with "scannability" is to have a toggle in the LaTeX code which changes it from focusing on displaying the document as a typeset whole to showing only the typeset code. A possible way to do this would be change the width of the page so that the text lines are so wide each paragraph would only be a single line, then you could set the PDF view to only be the width of the widest code line at the left edge.
- tincholio 2y agoI've also used it fairly extensively, both in academia and in industry jobs (using Emacs org-mode, with several target languages, often combined). I found it very useful when thinking through a problem, and as documentation for myself later on. At some point it starts to become a bit unwieldy. Nowadays, most of my work is in Clojure, and I find that the literate workflow gets in the way of REPL-driven development, so I haven't been using it as much lately. Overall, I'd highly recommend it.