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Noweb was an amazing little tool. Very sweet clean architecture with a simple straightforward textual intermediate representation, accessible to simple pipelined processing, and a lovely community of add-ons.

And then? It was reimplemented in 'icon', incompatible Proteine, too, and the community feel apart.

That's a real pity because noweb got almost everything right.

However.

Imnsho the real challenge for literate programming is IDE support. Not only do you embed languages into each other. In addition you chip chop your code into fragments and distribute them all over your file...




Feels like Jupyter is closer to getting this right than anyone.


The notebooks I saw so far are linear, single language and don't do the weaving (shuffle and embed the code chunks into full files)

For their purpose, incrementally derive some computation and data analysis, that's fine. For describing a complex system to both a human reader and a machine, in that order, that would not be enough.




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