I believe you're wrong - writers can, and do, steal styles and ideas from each other all the time. Not to mention, the editors are basically doing this:

> can modify it, along with the prose, and maintain the quality of the literate document.

for a living. As long as you're accomplished enough of a writer, you'll be able to analyze the works of others and copy them easily. It's coming up with your own style that's a problem.

To summarize: exceptionally good writers will be able to modify and expand each other's work without much effort. Or at least that's what I believe, based on some personal experiences with writing and writers. It should be quite similar with literate programming, too.

Doubt u get what beetle said. It is far more work to rewrite an essay with a different thesis.

Obviously. But we're talking about modifying the existing text, not rewriting it. How often do you have a chance to redo a whole project with completely different implementation and/or completely changed requirements? In my experience, most of the programming work is about adding new chapters to the existing text, and editing the existing text in some areas to make it easier to reason about. In other words, it's either extending the existing functionality, or refactoring it. It's not about rewriting the whole thing.

I would be happy to know, how experienced are you with actually writing creative works, working with a text, working on editing it, and so on? Again, I'm not 100% sure if literate programming would be exactly the same, but if it is similar to creative writing, then - I stand by this point - personal style of writing is not a problem. For two reasons:

- it's trivial to adjust your writing to an existing style when doing light editing and small extensions

- it doesn't matter if different stories in an anthology are written in different styles (actually, you buy anthologies because of different styles), so big extensions and rewrites in a different style are also ok