axiom VS luatex

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.

Notice that the TeX you have installed locally is many conversion steps removed from the WEB source.

Pascal code is extracted from the WEB. Then the Pascal is translated into C. Afterwards, years of development have accumulated on that C source to handle utf-8, modern fonts, PDF output, etc.

Most work nowadays happens on top of LuaTeX that replaces and extends pdfTeX.

There are shockingly few people maintaining that core of the TeX environment.

The source control is mirrored here: https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex/tree/experimental

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TeX-Live/luatex.git