geom VS lmt

On the flip side, I got to read some of the Clojure source code, which was very educational. I also got to understand a bit more the usefulness of protocols (using defprotocol and defrecord to provide several implementations). Here it was very useful to read the source code of thi-ng/geom.

This would make sense if Knuth used literate programming primarily for academic papers. But in fact he created WEB for writing TeX and METAFONT, both of which (while their source code was published as a book later) were production systems, and in fact for several decades now he uses CWEB for all programs he writes, including several a week that he writes for himself. (Some of which are online at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html .) In contrast, apart from the paper he wrote introducing LP, and the two Bentley columns about LP in CACM, I'm not aware of any other academic paper of his that presents programs — at any rate, the total number must be very small.

The goal is not an "academic paper"; his experience (and that of others who have seriously tried LP) is that it helps with actual writing of programs, less time spent debugging, etc.

Yes, there are challenges with two or more programmers, but nothing unsurmountable. See "Literate Programming on a Team Project" (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/techreports/1991/302.pdf coauthored by Norman Ramsey, who later developed noweb) and some stories like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17484452 (and https://github.com/thi-ng/geom which went from LP to conventional).

One more tool to accomplish this is lmt [0] which, despite minimal documentation, is quite pleasing to use.

[0] https://github.com/driusan/lmt

I personally use literate programming to maintain my "dotfiles", mainly NixOS [1], and I _love_ it. I like to describe all possible alternative tools, why I don't use them, possible tools that look nice, random ideas and blog posts that describe parts of my config, add TODOs and screenshots, ... in short everything that is really ugly to do inside source code comments. Also I gain structure; adding headings to a 3000 LOC config is very nice.

For tangling I use lmt [2], as it works with Markdown and also play nice with Emanote [3] (full syntax highlighting inside the code blocks.). That means all my "dotfiles" are inside my Zettelkasten [4] and can be navigated like any other note I have.

[1]: https://nixos.org/

[2]: https://github.com/driusan/lmt

[3]: https://github.com/srid/emanote

[4]: https://zettelkasten.de/

I switched to NixOS half a year ago. The reason? I fell in love with literate programming (I use [1]); being able to write (and read) your whole OS configuration is the dream!

There are few bad sides to NixOS though.

The community consists mostly of programmers, which means I am missing some creative tools (mockups, mindmaps, ..). In the future I will be able to provide/build them myself, but it is not a smooth transition from my previous arch setup.

Also the whole documentation sucks: There are three (!) official manuals + the home-manager manual + Nix pills + YT + random blogs where I have to piece everything together.

Still I find NixOS superior to every other OS (windows, linux) I have tried so far. I just feel free and am not afraid to fuck up anything [2], as I can just go to a previous generation when it doesn't boot.

Lastly, as my config is in git, I am free to try new tools -- If I don't like them, I just remove their line in my config. No more chasing after random install folders!

[1]: https://github.com/driusan/lmt