>Put another way, how can you beat thoughtful variable or function names and judicious comments?

Writing why and how you did something.

The setup for org lets you write the equivalent of jupyter notebooks for every language, which means that you can show a toy implementation of what you're doing before the real code. This toy code is live, completely independent of the rest of the project and can be poked at by anyone opening the org file without screwing anything else up.

I have programs written in org-mode which tangle and weave not only the code but the devops. Chapter 1 is the setup for the system, chapter 2-N is code, chapter N+1 launches the app.

I have only really done it with python and C so far. But I managed to get Scala setup today in less time than it would take to get an ide working.

The tools are still immature, tangle especially needs much finer, and better documented control. But even in this state it's the only tool I can use to write programs which I can pickup three years later and grok in an afternoon. The only downside is that the development for the tool is stuck in the 90s with emails for bugs and patches.