Literate programming, as originally described by Knuth, is a good essential idea embodied as a bunch of accidental instantiations of the idea that have gone bad

Literate programming, as originally described by Knuth, is a good essential idea embodied as a bunch of accidental instantiations of the idea that have gone badly out of date. Knuth's ideas at the time add a layer on top of programming languages to allow you to rearrange the code in a lot of ways that the languages at the time didn't support well or at all. It essentially adds an independent concept of "function", and adds on top of any ability the language had to have documentation its own documentation overlay on top. Problem is, in the meantime, languages got a lot better at functions, got more flexible in their organization, built in better capabilities for documentation and comments, and it all goes a different direction than the languages did. The result in the modern era is a rather bizarre multi-headed hydra of conflicting ideas about how things should be documented and tested. If someone wanted to resurrect the ideas, they need to not just try to get people to do what Knuth laid out decades ago super harder... they really need to sit down from the very beginning and work out how to update it in the modern era to be less redundant to what we already have. It could be as simple as taking modern doc strings and upgrading them a bit to allow highly-formatted comments to be embedded into code. Or, instead of trying to "weave" the code into a static book, allow the user to specify an entry point and then follow through everything that happens in the functions that it calls and turn that into a book, e.g., say "I'm going to enter this web framework through this path, tell me everything that happens". Or some other idea I don't have yet. Something that harmonizes with modern languages instead of fighting them.