On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Ralf Hemmecke wrote: > On 12/05/2009 04:54 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote: >> Ralf Hemmecke wrote: >>> Waldek, >>> >>> Since we have literate programming, I think your explanation would be >>> best put just next to your implementation. Can you commit that? >>> >> >> No!!! I _really_ do not want to see such texts inside source >> files. Such for given person such text may be useful once, >> maybe few times, but having to read it or even only look at >> it every time when looking at code is simply too distracting. > > Hmmm. OK, I cannot and will not force anybody to find literate > programming important. > > There are still proper tools missing to support LP. Thank you, Martin > and Franz, that now I know you are more or less on the LP side and > find this a good thing. > ...
Perhaps there are also people like me who have "lost faith" in the concept of literate programming. When I first started with the Axiom project several years ago I originally thought it was a good idea and a reasonable response to the serious problem of lack of documentation of the Axiom system. But now I agree with Waldek that almost always the "documentation" part of the pamphlet files gets in the way of my understanding of the code and work almost exclusively with the .spad files until forced to re-assemble them into the pamphlet form. I do not think that this is only a result of the lack of proper tools to support LP although I have long argued that there are better approaches than the one originally advocated by Donald Knuth. There are multiple problems but I think the most serious problem is that the methodology just does not fit the psychology of many (most?) of the talented people who are able to do this kind of work - particularly when they do it voluntarily. Advocated "re-education" and greater self-discipline is simply impractical. And hoping that other motivated users/developers will appear who are willing to put an effort into documenting other people's code is simply unrealistic. Having worked with Sage for awhile it seems to me that the "doc string" methodology much better suits the current state-of-the-art and state-of-mind in software development. Ironically this is very similar to the ++ style comments in Spad and how they interact with hyperdoc. I am very happy that Waldek has stated elsewhere that he considers the hyperdoc documentation to be the "definitive source" for documentation of FriCAS and that he spent considerable effort to resurrect the tools from the original Axiom source code to help keep Hyperdoc up to date. It seems that even more can be done in this direction to advance the original approach developed before Axiom became an open source project. For example as I understand it the Axiom book was originally extracted from the same set of enhanced tex files combined with documentation in the Axiom source code and derived by running Axiom itself. I think that it was a great experiment but in the end it is rather unfortunate that Tim Daly choose to adopt a new "technology" based on the Knuth literate programming approach when initiating the first open source Axiom project rather than focusing on extending and expanding the use of hyperdoc. I cannot see any evidence at all that the use of literate programming as such in the original Axiom project has contributed anything to the acceptance of Axiom in the potential user/developer community. Needless to repeat I suppose that this is of course only my personal opinion. :-) Regards, Bill Page. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To post to this group, send email to fricas-de...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to fricas-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en.
