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Noweb – A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming

(www.cs.tufts.edu)
140 points Tomte | 1 comments | 27 Feb 21 20:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.368s | source
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gnuvince ◴[27 Feb 21 21:26 UTC] No.26288322[source]▶
Hijacking this topic to talk about something I've been thinking about lately: literate diffs.

I find that the order of diffs given by git is not optimized for helping a reviewer understand the change. Sometimes the order of files will not be in the most logical way; sometimes unrelated changes (e.g., a text editor removing blanks at the end of lines) create noise; etc.

I've been thinking that it would be interesting to have a tool where the author can take the diff of their commit(s), order them in a way that is conducive to understanding and explain each part of the diff. That'd be similar to having the author do a code walkthrough, but at the pace of the reader rather than the author.

replies(6): >>26288537 #>>26288793 #>>26288837 #>>26289067 #>>26289125 #>>26289821 #
1. mikepurvis ◴[27 Feb 21 22:34 UTC] No.26288793[source]▶
Love it. Currently there's a gap where the diff is generated by your review platform, but it would be amazing if there was a way to submit your annotated/ordered diff and the platform would use it as the review starting point, provided it passed validation in terms of actually being a representative and equivalent diff.