> Unfortunately, no one has yet volunteered to write a program using another’s system for literate programming. A fair conclusion from my mail would be that one must write one’s own system before one can write a literate program, and that makes me wonder how widespread literate programming is or will ever become. This column will continue only if I hear from people who use literate-programming systems that they have not designed themselves.
And it did not continue. Since then though, it appears that Noweb (and more recently, org-babel, and somewhere in between the Leo editor) is among the literate-programming systems that have been the most successful at getting others to use them!
Separately, something amusing:
When Donald Knuth came up with "literate programming" (partly because it had been suggested to him, by Tony Hoare IIRC, that he ought to publish as a book the source of the TeX program he was rewriting, so he was led to solve the problem of exposition) and the idea of programs as literature, he made a joke (or maybe he was half-serious, hard to say):
> Perhaps we will even one day find Pulitzer prizes awarded to computer programs. (http://literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf)
That does not seem likely, but reality is stranger than one can imagine: a literate computer program won an Oscar! In 2014, an Academy Award (Scientific and Technical) was given to the authors of the book Physically Based Rendering (http://www.pbr-book.org/), itself a literate program. So we have this video of the award presentation, where actors Kristen Bell and Michael B. Jordan read out the citation and one of the awardees (Matt Pharr) thanks Knuth for inventing literate programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d9juPsv1QU