Well, thank you guys. As always, making one’s own opinion remains the best issue 
And as always, I find interesting arguments in both of your emails.
The thing is, in the industrial world, they mainly focus on productivity. They only begin
to understand that writing programs is difficult, nearly an art to itself.
At first sight, I found CWEB to be an apparent gain in both productivity and clarity.
Productivity because you write both the doc and the source at the same time.
I know Doxygen-like programs allow this too, but to my mind, the main difference is,
in classical source code the documentation is limited to the source code layout whereas
in litterate programming (I’m not refering to CWEB in particular), it is the source code
which is constraint to the documentation layout.
Moreover, the source code seems far more easy to understand for a new developer
integrating the project.
However, talking about CWEB in particular, although the idea is worth paying attention
to, maybe TeX/LaTeX is not the better way to make it popular ; and I’m not reconsidering
TeX/LaTeX 's power and popularity.
To finish, I agree that although Knuth has brought a lot to computer science, it doesn’t
mean that all his ideas are good ideas.
Some of you know another application of the Litterate Programming paradigm other
than Knuth’s CWEB ?
Again, thank you.
Julien.
----- Message d’origine ----De : Jeff <j_post at pacbell.net>
? : A list for developers using the SDL library. (includes SDL-announce)
Envoy? le : Vendredi, 25 Juillet 2008, 7h48mn 25s
Objet : Re: [SDL] CWEB
On Thu July 24 2008 20:48, KHMan wrote:
Getting a bit OT,
Agreed.
Knuth has been drumming this for decades and there is practically
zero uptake in the real world market. IMHO Knuth doesn’t think
like the rest of us – he’s a mathematician.
And this is a bad thing? Computer science is applied mathematics.
Gives examples of algorithms in MIX/MMIX
Yeah, MMIX is a bit dated, but the idea is to keep it simple.
while practically every other educator uses
a programming language or clear pseudo-code.
From a practical point of view, I agree that a standard programming language
or pseudo code is more useful. But Knuth is trying to convey basic ideas, not
make it easy for programmers to cut and paste without understanding what
they’re doing.
I can’t help but think the cweb/web thing is meant to turn source
code into a big ‘elegant’ math equation.
Source code is a big math equation, elegant or otherwise. Doubt it? Give me
your compiled source and I’ll return to you a (really huge) NUMBER that
defines your application.
Real cool stuff for
"up in the clouds" kind of academia.
Academia is not “up in the clouds”. It’s down to Earth basics. It’s from those
basics that we working programmers build “up in the clouds” applications.
This is the only serious disagreement I have with your comments.
Jeff
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