As people repeatedly say in trying to rebut my OP, it's important not to cherry-pick examples. I try to be careful to find the best examples when criticizing. I

As people repeatedly say in trying to rebut my OP, it's important not to cherry-pick examples. I try to be careful to find the best examples when criticizing. In that spirit, here's a couple of examples from https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/hwtime.w https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/hwtime.w is the very first, and most easy to justify introducing a language, but it doesn't do much of that. It does your thing of explaining stdio. A slightly more advanced example https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/hull.w https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/hull.w doesn't explain #includes, and doesn't describe the language as far as I can see/recall. So feel free to share examples where people document the language. But that doesn't feel like a big anti-pattern to me.