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.

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.

It's unfortunate that Funnelweb itself wasn't written in a literate style!

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/