> But this does not mean that _in general_, literate programming has not > its strength especially for complex and weaven program... or even for > writing the tools, the bricks one combines in a pipeline like McIlroy does.
I'll say amen, especially for a system of many little parts. My point wasn't to bash literate programming at all. Rather I'd say that big elaborate constructions of many aspects are fragile, hard to understand and work with, and of limited use. Instead, let our tools combine bits of code into a bigger whole, and reuse the tools for other wholes (cf Lego bricks). I've used LaTeX and noweb daily since the first quarter of 2007 to write papers that are literate programs. They work well to organize and document collections of many small command-line guide files, shell scripts, makefiles, data files, C and lex source, and a real-time gnuplot driver I downloaded from the page of a guy at NASA. (I posted a few recent simple examples, in the tufte-handout style, at http://swtools.wordpress.com/papers/ . I plan to ask for a publishing release for the really interesting ones now behind a corp firewall.) > Thierry Laronde Jason Catena
