This is the name of a concept to combine source code and highly structured human-readable documentation, such that the main artefact is the documentation, and the secondary artefact the full source code extracted from it. Any change to the source means changing the explanatory documentation of the goals and reasoning at the same time. It was invented by no other than Don Knuth, and he, together with his collaborators, wrote the TeX program in it, to show how it is useful in practice.

I myself have used the technique in various occasions at work, for example when taking on an important but almost unreadable piece of code I inherited at work, to preparing sources for a complex algorithm for handover when I was leaving another larger project, and also in leisure coding.

The tool which is most widely used for this approach today is Emacs org-mode. It has the advantage that it works for every programming language, and you will likely find full examples for all languages you use, but many other tools (for example for vim) exist.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    131·
    2 days ago

    You want to turn my 300 lines of clear, readable and concise logic into 1,000 lines of English paragraphs that break up the functions of my code into yet smaller pieces of code devoid of context? Now I have to dig through that book, ignoring all the shit I’ve read hundreds of times because it doesn’t compile into anything, just to debug an off-by-1 error in a loop buried in a paragraph explaining the original developers diatribe on why we’re looping over that range? Fuck. No.

    This is the sort of academic crap that sounds good but in practice is just terrible for anything other than small projects that are intended specifically to teach.

    • bitcrafter@programming.dev
      11·
      15 hours ago

      You want to turn my 300 lines of clear, readable and concise logic into 1,000 lines of English paragraphs that break up the functions of my code into yet smaller pieces of code devoid of context?

      If a function has 300 lines without a lot of supporting documentation then I doubt that it is “clear, readable and concise” anyway.

      Now I have to dig through that book, ignoring all the shit I’ve read hundreds of times because it doesn’t compile into anything, just to debug an off-by-1 error in a loop buried in a paragraph explaining the original developers diatribe on why we’re looping over that range?

      I have never found it hard at all to skip past comments that are not relevant because my code editor helpfully colors them differently from the rest of the code, making it easy. Does your editor not do the same?

      (Also, by now you should be especially good at skipping past it, given that you have apparently “read [it] hundreds of times” instead of skipping past it, for some reason.)

      This is the sort of academic crap that sounds good but in practice is just terrible for anything other than small projects that are intended specifically to teach.

      It depends on what you are doing. If you are implementing relatively simple logic like a REST API handler, then it is probably overkill. If you are implementing a relatively advanced algorithm, then having a running narrative of what is going can be extremely helpful.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        11·
        12 hours ago

        If a function has 300 lines without a lot of supporting documentation then I doubt that it is “clear, readable and concise” anyway.

        Code - not function. Files often have multiple functions in them. If you can’t read and understand code - I don’t want you on my team.

        I have never found it hard at all to skip past comments that are not relevant because my code editor helpfully colors them differently from the rest of the code, making it easy. Does your editor not do the same?

        If it’s something people will simply skip over then it’s not useful. Don’t pollute code with tons of unnecessary comments that you think will be useful for some “perceived future”. They just add to your maintenance work.

        Write your code to be understandable and document the architecture/design separately.

        It depends on what you are doing. If you are implementing relatively simple logic like a REST API handler, then it is probably overkill. If you are implementing a relatively advanced algorithm, then having a running narrative of what is going can be extremely helpful.

        Agree - most code is pretty straight forward. Save the comments for where it’s needed.