> I had a good experience with LP for some Dylan code, but I did find > the overhead of trying to document something before I had worked it > out in the code was prohibitive. I'm not sure how well literate > programming fits with exploratory programming, but maybe that's just > me. :-) > > - Rob.
Rob, given that google exists it's really hard to consider writing something from scratch as a brand new idea, at least for me. google generates hundreds of pages which contain background material. reading, and then writing the documentation before/during writing the source code is more common once a literate style is adopted. when i'm "working it out in the code" it's probably because i'm unclear about a language feature which is pretty rare these days because i try to write dirt-simple code. the hardest part is making global changes and code reorgs which can cause whole chapters to be invalid and have to be rewritten. and, of course, having spent the whole day re-documenting stuff doesn't feel like progress. it is clear why there are so many badly written books in the world... who wants to rewrite? :-) but this has a programming analog anyway. changing a data structure from a list to a struct can end up smashing whole reams of code for no visible progress. for me it's a question of "quality" which is always expensive. high quality tools like latex are a challenge to learn and high quality programs have high quality documentation with a lot of care in the writing. knuth alluded to the quality issue by using the "literate" term. he, quite cleverly, never mentioned the expense :-) t _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
