One of my coworkers at a previous company was Raymond Chen. As a grad student under Donald Knuth, he got to program using Donald Knuth's Literate Programming.
Raymond recommends against that style of programming.
Tooling is very poor. Debugging is very difficult. Documentation-and-code still become out-of-sync just as comments-and-code become out-of-sync, despite proximity (in both scenarios).
As yet-another-alternative to traditional text-based source code files, there are some potential novel ideas from Bret Victor, some alternative IDEs such as found in Lego Mindstorms that are visually oriented rather than text-oriented, Smalltalk style IDE where the code is in the general environment, old DEC Forté style (pre-JavaScript) IDE where the code was in a database backing store, and novel ways of having text-based source as in Light Table.
So there are people working on the leading edge. Maybe one of those concepts will become mainstream.
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Donald Knuth described Literate Programming in 1979.
One of my coworkers at a previous company was Raymond Chen. As a grad student under Donald Knuth, he got to program using Donald Knuth's Literate Programming.
Raymond recommends against that style of programming.
Why does Raymond recommend against that style of programming?
Tooling is very poor. Debugging is very difficult. Documentation-and-code still become out-of-sync just as comments-and-code become out-of-sync, despite proximity (in both scenarios).
As yet-another-alternative to traditional text-based source code files, there are some potential novel ideas from Bret Victor, some alternative IDEs such as found in Lego Mindstorms that are visually oriented rather than text-oriented, Smalltalk style IDE where the code is in the general environment, old DEC Forté style (pre-JavaScript) IDE where the code was in a database backing store, and novel ways of having text-based source as in Light Table.
So there are people working on the leading edge. Maybe one of those concepts will become mainstream.