Literate programming

Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a program is given as an explanation of the program logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which a compilable source code can be generated.

The literate programming paradigm, as conceived by Knuth, represents a move away from writing programs in the manner and order imposed by the computer, and instead enables programmers to develop programs in the order demanded by the logic and flow of their thoughts. Literate programs are written as an uninterrupted exposition of logic in an ordinary human language, much like the text of an essay, in which macros are included to hide abstractions and traditional source code.

Literate programming (LP) tools are used to obtain two representations from a literate source file: one suitable for further compilation or execution by a computer, the "tangled" code, and another for viewing as formatted documentation, which is said to be "woven" from the literate source. While the first generation of literate programming tools were computer language-specific, the later ones are language-agnostic and exist above the programming languages.

Literate programming was first introduced by Donald E. Knuth. The main intention behind this approach was to treat program as a literature understandable to human beings. This approach was implemented at Stanford university as a part of research on algorithms and digital typography. This implementation was further called as “WEB” by Donald Knuth since he believed that it was one of the few three-letter words of English that hadn’t already been applied to computer. However, it correctly resembles the complicated nature of software delicately pieced together from simple materials.

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