# Literate Programming - Page: https://shared.btbytes.com/p/literate - Date: 2018-10-06 - Tags: literate-programming > 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 humans what we want the computer to do. -- **Donald E. Knuth, Literate Programming, 1984** ## Examples of literate programming - [ulix](http://ulixos.org/) a literate, teaching operating system. - [knitr](http://yihui.name/knitr/) Elegant, flexible and fast dynamic report generation with R - [stich](https://pystitch.github.io/) -- is a small python library for writing reproducible reports in markdown. It's heavily inspired by (read: a python clone of) knitr and RMarkdown. - [ferret.org](https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret/blob/master/ferret.org) the entire source of Ferret programming language as an emacs org file. ## Tools [Literate](https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate) -- A modern literate programming system written in D brew tap zyedidia/literate brew install --HEAD zyedidia/literate/literate In addition to those of CWEB: * Markdown based -- very easy to read and write Literate source. * Generates readable and commented code in the target language (the generated code is usable by others) * Reports syntax errors back from the compiler to the right line in the literate source * Supports any language including syntax highlighting and pretty printing in HTML * Compatible with Vim ([literate.vim](https://github.com/zyedidia/literate.vim)) * Highly customizable (you can add your own HTML or CSS) * Runs fast -- wc.lit compiled for me in 7ms for both code and HTML output * Supports TeX equations with `$` notation. Inspired from CWEB: * Automatically generates hyperlinks between code sections * Formatted output similar to CWEB --- I wrote [lua4py](https://www.btbytes.com/lua4py.html) page using Literate. --- See also the [Nimib](https://pietroppeter.github.io/nimib/index.html) project by Nim programmers.