portia VS knot

For the record, I wrote portia[0], based on funnelweb and which accept a (mostly) compatible syntax, in a literate style. Its source/doc can be browsed [1].

I still use it from time to time, especially for small, well defined projects, because I find it useful to have to argue with myself when designing a software. It's not so much about producing a nice documentation or a proper exposition of some idea, than it is about having to formulate all the reasoning, the alternatives, and the choices.

[0]: https://github.com/rixed/portia

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/