Hi!

Don't waste time on this. It is obvious rubbish. I took the time to follow these first sentences and it led to wasted time. I'm tempted to build a robot to filter this shite out.

"When I look around at the legacy of literate programming, systems to do so-called semi- or quasi-literate programming dominate. These are systems that focus on generating beautifully typeset documentation without allowing the author to arbitrarily order code."

What is wrong with that sentence? The article looks fine to me.

Possibly that CWEB did allow arbitrarily re-ordered code, so it seems strained to criticize Knuth on that basis?

The problem I always saw with it is that no ordering is necessarily perfect - there might be different optimums for different purposes.

Did Knuth use the feature?

I find it interesting that some people do ask themselves if "literate programming" should require reading a lot of code...but then dismiss it.

Maybe it does. As I think about it, when I was first programming, one of the things that I and other people did in those days was to type programs in from magazines. Another influence on me was taking code in one language or for one system and porting it to another. And I certainly read plenty of code by my co-workers during the years I worked as a programmer.

Maybe reading a great deal is and always has been required to be a decent writer. No idea if Knuth has or does.

How do posts like this even make it upstream? There's a summer effect going on, this site's getting infiltrated by brain dead pop science morons.

(2014)