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Noweb – A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming

(www.cs.tufts.edu)
140 points Tomte | 3 comments | 27 Feb 21 20:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.83s | source
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mmcdermott ◴[27 Feb 21 20:51 UTC] No.26288044[source]▶
Literate Programming is one of those ideas I keep coming to. There is an idea there that touches on something I find to be true about software development, namely that the communication of an idea to other humans is the most critical piece. There is a similar idea in Naur's paper "Programming as Theory Building."

That said, I've never loved the LaTeX-centric nature of most tools. I don't like heavier markup systems while I am writing prose, which is why I wrote SpiralWeb (https://github.com/michaeljmcd/spiralweb) as a Pandoc/Markdown centric tool.

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1. sidpatil ◴[27 Feb 21 20:58 UTC] No.26288106[source]▶
Obligatory shilling of Org-babel, for those using Emacs and Org-mode: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/
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2. kmstout ◴[28 Feb 21 05:32 UTC] No.26290950[source]▶
I've been using Org for a little over a year, and it's actually quite nice. To support a blog post last year (https://reindeereffect.github.io/2020/05/05/index.html) I did my own quick and dirty rendition of chunk labels, chunk chain navigation, and clickable references.

Lately I've built a faster, mostly drop-in replacement for org-babel-tangle (that doesn't unnecessarily clobber files that haven't changed); and I'm finishing up a more complete chunk formatter for HTML export, along with usable chunk index generation. Once that's done, I'll quit nerd sniping myself on literate programming systems for awhile and finish up a missive on programming a Turing machine to solve the Towers of Hanoi.

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3. stevekemp ◴[28 Feb 21 07:36 UTC] No.26291444[source]▶
I keep meaning to experiment with bable/tangle in Emacs.

I setup a simple literate configuration of my init file via markdown, which worked out really well, but doing it "properly" in org-mode would be a nice evolution.

With markdown I just search for code-blocks, write them all sequentially to a temporary buffer and evaluate once done. So it is very simplistic, but also being able to write and group things is useful:

https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.d/init.md