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Noweb – A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming

(www.cs.tufts.edu)
140 points Tomte | 4 comments | 27 Feb 21 20:11 UTC | HN request time: 1.978s | 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. loa_in_ ◴[27 Feb 21 22:15 UTC] No.26288675[source]▶
I found Mr. Ross' funnelweb utility to have the best syntax. Unique and easy to read.

http://ross.net/funnelweb/tutorial/index.html

Unfortunately the only known implementation was last updated over two decades ago, and is written in pretty hard to understand C.

I asked for permission and started a repository here: https://github.com/loa-in-/fw-utf8

I currently have it unmodified there, except for disabled check for ASCII range. (this modification is included in initial commit, sorry, my bad). Otherwise code is the same.

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2. nerdponx ◴[28 Feb 21 04:11 UTC] No.26290607[source]▶
It's unfortunate that Funnelweb itself wasn't written in a literate style!
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3. rixed ◴[28 Feb 21 16:33 UTC] No.26294483[source]▶
For the record, I wrote portia[0], based on funnelweb and which accept a (mostly) compatible syntax, in a literate style. Its source/doc can be browsed [1].

I still use it from time to time, especially for small, well defined projects, because I find it useful to have to argue with myself when designing a software. It's not so much about producing a nice documentation or a proper exposition of some idea, than it is about having to formulate all the reasoning, the alternatives, and the choices.

[0]: https://github.com/rixed/portia [1]: http://rixed.github.io/portia/

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4. loa_in_ ◴[28 Feb 21 19:01 UTC] No.26296026{3}[source]▶
Your project is just enough working (and up to spec!) that I might just restart my (100% compatible) funnelweb resurrection in literate format. Thank you!