20 Nov
2011
20 Nov
'11
7:04 p.m.
On 20/11/11 9:27 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once
stated:
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.
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.
I'm oversimplifying, but in all seriousness, 90% of the code I've seen
written by co-workers has been written by people who Just Don't Care.
Don't Care enough to read RFCs. Don't Care enough to write comments or
doc. Don't Care enough to learn things like regular expressions, CSS,
makefiles, or even boolean expressions. Don't Care enough to improve
their skills in their spare time (or even at work). Don't Care enough to
realise that programming means understanding and modelling a problem
domain. Don't Care enough even to spell correctly. And I could go on...
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. For instance, ...
Literate programming is just too much work.
Maybe "programming" is just too much work (for some).
-spc (And frankly, after seeing some of the "documentation" we produced at
work [6], literate programming would still be a failure)
Now, *that* part I agree is probable.
--T