Yeah maybe you're right, I just remember all those hello world examples with advanced design patterns and how that gets people all excited to overengineer and overcomplicate everything.

Edit: I'm a bit tired of all these "this is not something that you would actually ever do" caveats, well, don't show it then?

I think a key difference between what you’re describing and Knuth’s program is that those design patterns don’t actually serve a purpose, they don’t solve a problem and just add incidental complexity. Knuth’s trie is an actual solution to the word frequency problem that doesn’t add much incidental complexity — it just tackles the fundamental complexity from first principles, so all of that complexity is staring you in the face. Once you have well-motivated complexity to make sense of, you also have a well-motivated use for LP.

"Edit: I'm a bit tired of all these "this is not something that you would actually ever do" caveats, well, don't show it then?"

Because solving real world problems in a solid way is often too complicated for a presentation, but to show something special you sometimes have no other choice to come up with non real solution that show the principle. But I agree that you can do this in a bad or good way.

Yeah or is it like the infomercials where people show you these awesome gadgets that solve problems that you actually don't have, just to sell you a bunch of crap so that they can make money.

Yes. Literate programming is an incredibly useful tool, if you do happen to have the problem it solves, that is textual communicating with people with a very large difference in knowledge from yours.

But almost nobody has to solve this on practice. The ones that do have recreated the idea again and again (today's most common iteration are Jupyter notebooks), because it's a great idea. But they are always a waste of time for most people.

> Yeah or is it like the infomercials where people show you these awesome gadgets that solve problems that you actually don't have, just to sell you a bunch of crap so that they can make money.

Except that they do solve problems people have, just not problems you have. They are meant for, or at least often employed by, the disabled community.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/20/17791354/products-pe...