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Do you have thoughts on literate programming? This is turning programming into the act of writing. I find it to be very liberating. Many of the sins mentioned

• klibertp 12y ago
  The problem with literate programming - which I absolutely love myself - is that you demand people to be both good coders and good writers. From my personal experience, there certainly are people who fit the bill, but they are a minority. Being (hoping to be) one of them it took me a long time to understand that not everybody is able to write good prose and good code at the same time... and that there are even people utterly incapable of one of these, while still being proficient in the other. Having said this, encouraging literate programming practices is certainly a good idea, just don't expect it to be a silver bullet for code quality issues.
• brudgers 12y ago
  I'm wondering if good coders are just good writers, and "a good coder" is simply what we call someone who writes well in a particular genre in the same way we call someone "a good poet." To put it another way, we see a continuum between the acts of writing a product manual and a textbook and a news feature and a short story and a novel. Why are we convinced computer programs ontological different? All that said, Literate Programming often seems over done to me. Stripped down to it's essentials code can be crafted like poetry. Literate programming is only literature when being crafted as a literate program allows for something literary to be expressed which can't be said without untangling the knot of procedure and weaving it into a document.