axiom VS KeenTeX

The literate macro is just standard latex. The command line extraction functions are:

Lisp program to extract latex chunks: https://github.com/daly/axiom/blob/master/books/tangle.lisp

C program to extract latex chunks: https://github.com/daly/axiom/blob/master/books/tanglec.c

Note that the C program is just a hand translation of the Lisp code.

The lisp code has an explanation and the necessary latex macros. The idea is to scan the latex, find each named code 'chunk', and add each one to a hash table. Then the hash table is scanned to dump the requested chunk to stdout. For example:

\begin{chunk}{part1}

I think one "unfortunate" side effect of literate programming with a "stupid" procedual language like C, Pascal or even Java - is that your lp system tends toward becoming your macro system.

It does allow straightforward, short procedual/structured programs to become very readable and easily understandable - but for bigger "piles of code" - it's probably not that good a fit in practice.

I guess https://github.com/daly/axiom is both an argument for this being true (I seem to recall there was an effort to get away from lp) - and against (proof of existence: it's a big system, it's old, it seems to not be dead).

Then there's the other thing - I don't recall who's quote it is - but it is along the lines of: "There are few good programmers, there are few good writers of prose/technical documentation - therefore the subset of people that are both great programmers and great writers are tiny - and that is the subset for whom literate programming is a great fit".

I do think there's a middle ground though, and "notebooks" for "executable, repeatable" research papers is one such middle ground (or: to write a great cs paper your team need to have both skills anyway).

But there are certainly great programmers that can't write documentation on how to escape a wet paper bag.

From the code point of view, Axiom seems more interesting to me, but I need to study it more.

> Replacing TeX is pretty easy since it is a fairly small language.

Conceptually, easy. In practice, it can go sideways. Take JMathTeX, for instance:

http://jmathtex.sourceforge.net/

The code had (has?) a particularly nasty bottleneck where it an exception is thrown for every single character in a macro name until the macro name matches a known TeX command. In Java, throwing an exception requires filling out a complete stack trace. I forked the project and optimized the font glyph to SVG path conversion algorithm, as well. The TeX library went from non-real-time rendering of a few formulas to real-time rendering of 1,000 formulas.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/JMathTeX

Here's a screenshot showing my JMathTeX fork integrated into my text editor, KeenWrite:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/scr...

For anyone interested in how to install TeX itself:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/576314/2148

I forked and optimized a version of JMathTeX to provide plain TeX rendering in Java:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/JMathTeX