Where is the LP Future?
Aaron W. Hsu
We have excellent systems out there for producing printed works, such as
CWEB, noweb, and more language specific ones, but I'm curious what you think
the future direction should be for a literate programming system.
I'm working on a system that is almost ready for alpha release that
hopefully reveals where I see the future of literate programming is, but
that's just me, does anyone else have new development to share?
Aaron W. Hsu
--
Programming is just another word for the lost art of thinking.
dtopham
beginners learn how to program. What I like about it is that it forces
thought about the documentation (design) at the same time as the code.
Typically student programmers quickly get in the habit of skipping the
design part and jumping right to code. I teach C++ so I am using the
simplest environment that I have found which is nuweb. It has the
smallest learning curve and is language independent. I would be
interested in learning more about your (or anyone's) research in
easier, better ways to allow developers to use literate programming. -
Dave Topham
Manuel Collado
IMHO, the only future for LP is to integrate it in modern programming
environments. Regrettably, the current trend for program documentation
is to embed special marked-up comments into source code. This is the
opposite of LP, that embeds special marked-up code fragments into
general-purpose documents.
To my knowledge, the only programming environments that follow the LP
documentation way are the Oberon system and its derivatives (say
Component Pascal).
Probably, promoting LP to standard programming practice would require a
fundamental revision of the "source code" concept. And this means a big
change both in programmer's mental model and in mainstream programming
environments.
--
Manuel Collado - http://lml.ls.fi.upm.es/~mcollado