Digging more into literate programming to see what it's all about, and I still don't quite understand.
It seems like it has some of the benefit of something like TDD (double-entry bookkeeping of code and expected results), but without the explicit tests, which seems to be the glue keeping both sides in sync.
It also seems like it would run into the common comment complaint, which is that a bad comment is worse than no comment. But this time with gobs and gobs of comments.
It's fun! It's so cute that it works and that people make programs this way. It's like, I don't know, adorable and it's for its own sake as dumb as it is. Like having flower stationary ♥
@Sandra I do dig the output! I was just looking at @paul 's Voc PDF and it is like the best manual ever for grokking a new thing.
I don't know the scope of how the tanglers and WEB utils really work, so I may be strawman-ing this whole thing, but I'd be worried about the changes becoming very daunting in terms of maintenance. That being said, I do love TDD and that's a whole lot of that, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Maybe I am doomed to try this after all, as this is what usually happens
@milofultz @Sandra FWIW, I find Voc to be my least successful literate program. It was my first attempt, and ended up with a pretty document full of spaghetti code.
I think Kuf and Btprnt are better examples because for the most part I wrote the words first before the code:
@milofultz @Sandra I'd say that's pretty fair. There was a time where'd I'd reach for LP by default for everything. Nowadays, I usually only consider it when I'm working on something and think "huh, this is actually complicated/confusing and could use some careful thought".
Writing and coding simultaneously if you know where both are headed. That doesn't happen often enough for me. Some of the DSP algorithms I implement for sndkit have a "rough draft" phase where I just code it out and make sure it works, then I go back and write it out. Admittedly, the literate programming in sndkit is often more comments++ and less LP.
@paul @Sandra so it's safe to say that a good project for literate programming is one where getting a solution out of your head onto paper first is ideal? Or at least that trying to do the writing and the coding in tandem may lead to the spaghetti you mentioned?