Quote by Knuth

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2021 at 7:24 AM
> From: "Jean Louis" <bugs@gnu.support>
> To: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>
> Cc: moasenwood@zoho.eu, help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Quote by Knuth
>
> * Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> [2021-07-14 20:45]:
> > > There are no millions of programmers using "literate
> > > programming"...
> >
> > Disregarding students and academics almost nobody.
>
> Documentation strings in Emacs Lisp and commentary are literate
> programming. Though we do not have some nice formatter which will
> convert each function into nicely printed PDF with sections and
> similar. I don't think it is hard to make it in Emacs Lisp

Documentation strings are quite limited, Knuth was looking as
something more extensive.

I cannot see how we can make mathematical computations in code literate
because mathematics is full of esoteric glyphs that would complicate
rather than explain. Mixing everything together is a bad idea.

Even if we manage to get computations look like pseudocode, will that
aid understanding?  Not a lot.  It would still need time and focus to
figure out.  In mathematics, using prose gets things so complicated
that you will not understand anything.  You need some sort of compact lexicon
to absorb some quite complex ideas that cannot be condensed well enough
using prose.

After completing a building, you remove the scaffolding and clean everything
out.  Much in then hidden.

> --
> Jean
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