https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html
Knuths intention seems clear enough in his own writing:
Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.
and
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.