Scaling Literate Programming?
- by Tetha
Greetings.
I have been looking at Literate Programming a bit now, and I do like the idea behind it: you basically write a little paper about your code and write down as much of the design decisions, the code probably surrounding the module, the inner workins of the module, assumptions and conclusions resulting from the design decisions, potential extension, all this can be written down in a nice way using tex. Granted, the first point: it is documentation. It must be kept up-to-date, but that should not be that bad, because your change should have a justification and you can write that down.
However, how does Literate Programming Scale to a larger degree? Overall, Literate Programming is still just text. Very human readable text, of course, but still text, and thus, it is hard to follow large systems. For example, I reworked large parts of my compiler to use and some magic to chain compile steps together, because some "x.register_follower(y); y.register_follower(z); y.register_follower(a);..." got really unwieldy, and changing that to x y z a made it a bit better, even though this is at its breaking point, too.
So, how does Literate Programming scale to larger systems? Does anyone try to do that?
My thought would be to use LP to specify components that communicate with each other using event streams and chain all of these together using a subset of graphviz. This would be a fairly natural extension to LP, as you can extract a documentation -- a dataflow diagram -- from the net and also generate code from it really well. What do you think of it?
-- Tetha.
