i read a little about it many years ago but have never tried it. right now, for all its flaws, jupyter is the closest approximation to the literate-programming ideal i've found

Yes, Jupyter is definitely a contender for the crown, it's a very powerful environment. I've made use of a couple of very impressive notebooks (mostly around the theme of automatic music transcription) and it always gets me how seamlessly the shift between documentation and code is. I wished the Arduino guys would do something like that it would be make their programming environment feel less intrusive and less 'IDE' like (which mostly just gets in the way with endless useless popups).