Knuth's literate programming is completely bonkers from the software engineering perspective. Knuth never worked as a rank-and-file programmer in a corporation.

Knuth's literate programming is completely bonkers from the software engineering perspective. Knuth never worked as a rank-and-file programmer in a corporation. However, Knuth is definitely not doing it wrong from the perspective of Knuth. His approach is workable by someone else who is another Knuth. Such another Knuth would never work in collaboration with Knuth; he or she would have an office at a different institution, working on different research with different programs. Knuth's approach does not have to scale to 2 or beyond, or to megaprojects. Knuth's approach lets an author write a book or paper, and its accompanying code, as a single document. Knuth tested and refined his approach in the context of this use case, and of course it works. Knuth's approach to literate programming chops up the program into arbitrary pieces that don't necessarily even follow functional boundaries. The program unit he's interested in is any group of lines that deserve commentary. His system is like a macro preprocessor that stitches the program together via text inclusion of arbitrary lines, which are given a name. For instance, a function body might be pieced together from three separately defined texts. It's obvious that we can't simply cannot write the Linux kernel, MongoDB, Google Chat this way; basically anything that is not a solo effort. Even some solo efforts couldn't be done that way. The approach will not only scale to multiple developers, but also to certain project sizes and complexities. Solo projects can go into hundreds of thousands of lines; that's far beyond what we would want to develop using chopped up pieces of program text plugged into a book-like document, extracted to make a buildable program. TeX is Knuth's most famous program that has been maintained for many decades and used by others, which is also developed with a literate programming system. However, those core programs like tex and metafont are only a small part of an entire TeX distribution. The entire TeX ecosystem contained in a Tex distro is not banged up in that literate programming system! Supposedly, TeX generates out to around 50KLOC of C, and Metafont to around 20KLOC. I would guess that would probably just about start to be straining at the limitations. Knuth's intuition for a documentation system to handle about the size of the program he set out to create may have been spot on. Also, what fanf2 said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683602 "The tooling that supports literate programming is mostly about overcoming these problems with Pascal." Excerpt from a great comment!