knot VS spiralweb

Literate programming seems to becoming popular in the R community due to KnitR and Rmarkdown. This seems to have sparked a few similar-working tools with possibly broader scope and adoption. In my bookmarks I find:

- knot [1]: tangles source code from a text file formatted using plain markdown syntax, can use any markdown converter for weaving into a printable document

- snarl [2]: extends markdown code blocks with syntax used for tangling, its "weave" steps just removes the additional syntax and outputs plain markdown

- pylit [3] [4]: a bidirectional converter: code to formatted text and back. Uses reST for formatting, and preserves line numbers which is useful when debugging. Not an LP tool strictly, as it doesn't define/rearrange code blocks so you have to write your script in the order the compiler wants it, not in the order that would make the best exposition.

Both seem to preserve relative indentation of chunks, so would be useful for Python too.

[1]: https://github.com/mqsoh/knot

I'm a fan of https://github.com/mqsoh/knot/

Literate Programming is one of those ideas I keep coming to. There is an idea there that touches on something I find to be true about software development, namely that the communication of an idea to other humans is the most critical piece. There is a similar idea in Naur's paper "Programming as Theory Building."

That said, I've never loved the LaTeX-centric nature of most tools. I don't like heavier markup systems while I am writing prose, which is why I wrote SpiralWeb (https://github.com/michaeljmcd/spiralweb) as a Pandoc/Markdown centric tool.