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Noweb – A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming

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140 points Tomte | 1 comments | 27 Feb 21 20:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.264s | 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. memco ◴[27 Feb 21 22:41 UTC] No.26288837[source]▶
What you’re describing is already possible with Git: rebase and committing chunk/lines allows you to organize your changes coherently. The trick is finding ways to get into the habit of doing it that way and staying consistent with the whole team.

Edit: i’m not saying that this is a solved problem. I think the parent’s point is valid. I am just saying that there are some tools that make this possible and I agree that there is a definite need for improvements in this area.