20 Nov
2011
20 Nov
'11
10:03 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Toby Thain once stated:
On 20/11/11 9:27 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
My point is that software changes. Maybe, like one of the cases at work,
what we thought would work (using SMS) didn't. That whole section of the
code (and if it was a literate program, a whole section? Chapter?) was
scrapped and a whole new mechanism put into place. That wasn't a case of
"no time to do it right, but time to do it over" (to quote a future email)
but a case of "even the vendor didn't know how their own SMS system worked"
(or maybe didn't inform us---I'm not sure as I wasn't there for those
meetings).
TeX hasn't changed. Once written, the only changes have been the (very)
occasional error. It wasn't an entire section scrapped (that we know of)
because of a change in requirements.
And yes, the project I've been working on is working; it's now in
production and frankly, no bugs have been found---or rather, yes, bugs
*have* been found, but on the vendor's network that were never documented
nor mentioned to us, and thus, we had to work around those particular
issues.
Should we use literate programming? Frankly, we have some great
programmers; what we don't have are great writers. That may be asking too
much.
-spc (Also, the intended audience for our work is ourselves (right now,
five programmers total) and we don't license or give out the code.
Too small an audience to write a series of novels, frankly ... )
It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once
stated:
I've read up on literate programming (I even own a copy of "Literate
Programming" by Knuth) but even so, I never liked the idea all that much,
because it seems even *more* work than regular programming.
That's the point. It's MEANT to be, because "regular programming" is
where code goes to die. >these
don't seem to have impaired their reliability,
>performance, or sheer longevity: Being the 30-year de facto standard in
>academic publishing.
That's because practically noone can understand it besides Knuth, which
is why noone has been changing it. Software that doesn't change
doesn't have bugs introduced into it.
Hang on a second. Even if you don't like litterate programming, the fact
remains that the source code of TeX (and Metafont) is avaialble, as is an
explanation of what is going on. If there were serious bugs in it then
sombody who have fixed them by now.