Noweb – A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming

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.

Obligatory shilling of Org-babel, for those using Emacs and Org-mode: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

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.