On 6/29/07, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
Literate programming can currently be seen as religion. Even though TeX survived until today, there must be some reason why a lot of people don't follow it. I must say, I am happy that Tim set LP as a main goal for Axiom. I think it is an important one. But not only from Tim's and William's mails I learned that it should not be the only goal. Following LP too strictly, does not work. At least not at the moment. Currently, more important than LP is the need to attract more developers. Currently, the rules that everything must per properly documented should be a bit relaxed. Axiom currently is not documented properly and it will not be for another 10 years. We have a lot of legacy code. But without new and ambitious developers, Axiom will become even more uninteresting. Axiom must spread to the world and attract users and developers. If you set the entry barrrier too high. Axiom is going to become a Tim-only project. ...
I agree with both Ralf and William Sit on this issue. Like Ralf, I think that I am a strong supporter of the *concept* of literate programming, but that the experiment in literate programming as defined by Tim Daly in the current Axiom open source project is (for the most part) a failure. And I do not think that this is simply because insufficient effort has been devoted to developing this part of the project. Or rather I should say it the other way: insufficient effort has be devoted to literate programming in the Axiom project *because* the current approach to literate programming in the project is a failure. I think the Knuth-style literate programming (pamphlet) methodology is just not suitable to the task. But I am not sure what to do about this. I think that already the Axiom project has suffered a very significant and maybe even critical lose of interest on the part of other possible contributors at least in part because of the insistence on this approach. It complicates the build environment and puts a extra layer between the developer and the system. It is clear that developers do not want to be reading their source code from a dvi viewer, two steps removed from the problem on which they are focused. And at the same time the raw pamphlet format source code is even more awkward and obscure than the original "illiterate" source code by the interposed presence of coding and documentation which is normally otherwise "out of the way". These comments (by me, Ralf, William and others) should *not* be construed as in anyway being against documentation or even against the concept of literate programming. But as Ralf says, we have to face up to these uncomfortable facts or risk the death of the Axiom project due to placing a barrier which no developer other than the one who originated the idea is willing to climb. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
