Is Literate Programming useful or not?
dtopham
proponents of LP think:
jaialai.t...@gmail.com
as to go to someone's blog and participate in a flame war.
If LP doesn't work for somebody for whatever reason I don't think it
is worth anything to try and convince them they are wrong.
If anything, wouldn't that ruin any competitive advantage enjoyed
by LP practitioners? :)
Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
> I think that even "proponents of LP" aren't so zealous
> as to go to someone's blog and participate in a flame war.
> If LP doesn't work for somebody for whatever reason I don't think it
> is worth anything to try and convince them they are wrong.
> If anything, wouldn't that ruin any competitive advantage enjoyed
> by LP practitioners? :)
of LP, the more environment and tools are provided and supported, and the
more experiences there are to share and learn from others.
While I strongly believe in LP advantages, I actually do not use it,
because :
1) lack of tools suiting my needs
2) lack of a real standard in that area
3) I could not share/provide LP based source to others
Point #3 perhaps the more blocking. There are some advantages which must
be shared to be really advantage in practice (not just with theory),
otherwise, they simply dies or are no ways anyway.
--
Si les chats miaulent et font autant de vocalises bizarres, c’est pas pour
les chiens.
“I am fluent in ASCII” [Warren 2010]
Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
> On 3/16/11 12:02 PM, dtopham wrote:
>> I just found this interesting article and I am interested in what
>> proponents of LP think:
>>
I've just read the blog, and seems that it is rather advocating for the LP
spirit. It starts from LP as an experience, and try to go further. That's
all good. All of what is said in that paper as well as in the comments
generated after it, belongs to the same spirit as LP do: give the relevant
views of a design, and express it with the best suited vocabulary (either
textual or graphical) and "narative" style. That's good.
Manuel Collado
> ...
> While I strongly believe in LP advantages, I actually do not use it,
> because :
> 1) lack of tools suiting my needs
Yes. To develop programs we must use a programming environment. Current
LP tools are just for documentation.
To be effective, the LP document editor should provide also facilities
to compile, build, execute, debug, etc., as well as other logical views
of the code. Not to mention code syntax highlight, which is a bare minimum.
I've done some experiments based on XML representation of the source
code syntactic structure, combined with XHTML-like markup for textual
explanations. A customizable WYSIWYG XML editor is used as a front-end
for LP editing, weaving, tangling+compiling+showing-errors, executing,
etc. It works, but is just an academic toy.
> 2) lack of a real standard in that area
Not sure if this is a real problem. For rich text documentation HTML is
a widely used standard (among others).
> 3) I could not share/provide LP based source to others
>
> Point #3 perhaps the more blocking. There are some advantages which must
> be shared to be really advantage in practice (not just with theory),
> otherwise, they simply dies or are no ways anyway.
Probably yes.
--
Manuel Collado - http://lml.ls.fi.upm.es/~mcollado
rocher
> El 17/03/2011 2:02, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) escribió:
>
> > ...
> > While I strongly believe in LP advantages, I actually do not use it,
> > because :
> > 1) lack of tools suiting my needs
>
> Yes. To develop programs we must use a programming environment. Current
> LP tools are just for documentation.
>
> To be effective, the LP document editor should provide also facilities
> to compile, build, execute, debug, etc., as well as other logical views
> of the code. Not to mention code syntax highlight, which is a bare minimum.
Please try QWE: "QWE's not WEB for Emacs", a wysiwyg LP programming
environment on top of Emacs, programmed with Emacs-Lisp and QWE itself
(see http://www.nongnu.org/qwe/ for more information and some
screenshots). It is a "target-language independent" document structure
inspired by both LaTeX and WEB, using a customizable syntax to write
QWE commands (sectioning, charecter formating, annotations,
references, LP tags, etc). By "target-language independent" i mean you
can use QWE with virtually any programming language. The only
condition is that it must have one line comments ( like C/C++ "// ...
" ). As QWE depends only on Emacs Lisp, you can use QWE wherever you
can run a recent Emacs version.
QWE can freely interact with all the tools provided by Emacs, so its
quite easy to have a decent programming environment using ECB (http://
ecb.sourceforge.net), for instance. Docs/programms produced with QWE
are pure ASCII, human-readable, and thus it would be easy to port the
main idea behind QWE to other environments, like Eclipse (or even
'vi'?)
Unfortunately, I don't have much time to maintain QWE. There are lot
of things to do and modules to write, mainly to export QWE projects to
other formats, like HTML, LaTeX, odt, pdf, etc. However, I used QWE to
write QWE.
Regards,
--
Francesc Rocher
Aaron W. Hsu
I like the point about non-textual representations of code. I actually use
Scheme (using ChezWEB for LP) and APL. APL has workspaces and allows you
to create interactive documentation inside of your actual code
environment. I haven't figured out the best practices yet, but I think
there is much potential in that model.
Aaron W. Hsu
--
Programming is just another word for the lost art of thinking.