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0 pointsduped2y ago0 comments

I get that it's not exactly what we consider notebooks now, but Knuth was writing about literate programming several years before MathCAD.

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bmitc2y ago

I've never understood what Knuth considered literate programming. I've seen some examples of his and find them incomprehensivle. I think the issue with Knuth's contribution is that he only seemed to concentrate on the specification of a markup language, marred by TeX baggage.

The key idea of notebooks today are their interactiveness, the dynamic between a markup state and view state, and their multi-paradigm and multi-language nature.

bachmeier2y ago

Yeah, if you want to search for ancestors, I think literate programming definitely qualifies. I've also heard references to Smalltalk and Lisp machines as ancestors, but not being familiar with either, I can't say.

slowmovintarget2y ago

Knuth introduced the technique of literate programming in 1984, MathCAD was first released in 1986, and my copy of Literate Programming (the book of the thing) was published in 1992.

sriram_malhar2y ago

Knuth's literate programming notably differs from notebooks in that it was designed to write explanations meant for humans, which meant that the author could present the code in chunks in the narrative sequence; the code did not have to be in execution order, unlike notebooks.

falcor842y ago

>the code did not have to be in execution order

I'm not clear on this. Is it not just about having the function definitions in an arbitrary order just like all of us mortals do? Is there anything special about the code structure that Knuth proposes?

sriram_malhar2y ago

No, Knuth's cweb has the notion of chunks, which is just lines of code. It wires the chunk in dependency order. A chunk can have multiple functions, or no functions, or parts of functions; cweb doesn't care.

cafard2y ago

Part of the motivation might have been that he set up WEB for Pascal, which does enforce an order of declarations. Once he started working more with C, perhaps there was less reason; but he found that he enjoyed working in that manner. I haven't looked at anything released in that format for years, though.

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bmitc2y ago

The key idea of notebooks today are their interactiveness, the dynamic between a markup state and view state, and their multi-paradigm and multi-language nature.

bachmeier2y ago

slowmovintarget2y ago

Knuth introduced the technique of literate programming in 1984, MathCAD was first released in 1986, and my copy of Literate Programming (the book of the thing) was published in 1992.

sriram_malhar2y ago

falcor842y ago

>the code did not have to be in execution order

sriram_malhar2y ago

cafard2y ago

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