spiralweb VS portia

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.

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