Your comment illustrates another reason literate programming never took off :-) Until a reader has spent enough time reading and getting familiar with the conventions, how to navigate, etc (in my case it was several dozen hours), they experience a lot of resistance against simply reading the literate program, and keep wanting to read “the real code”.

Ultimately a program is a set of instructions to a computer, and when we as humans look at a program we're trying to conceptualize how these instructions are organized. (Essentially, “translate” them into a mental map.) We have so much more experience doing this with “real” code, knowing what we can ignore and when, and being able to do this at well — e.g. with things like function docstrings or public/private declarations, we're able to read them once and then have them basically fade away from our consciousness so we don't read them again. When faced with unfamiliar conventions, it takes a while to get that ability again.