When the topic of literate programming comes up, there’s a tendency to bemoan a lost art. A lot of people complain that, while Knuth’s WEB system allowed the user to write their code in whatever order made sense for the narrative, modern so-called “literate programming” tools more or less just extract all the code blocks from a markdown file, constraining the presentation format to whatever order the computer demands. What this analysis misses, I think, is that this is much less of a constraint with modern programming languages.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about whether conversational AI will replace programmers any time soon. One of the arguments against this happening is that natural language is inherently ambiguous; you need to very precisely specify what you want, and that looks like... a programming language, with all of the inherent complexity that programmers are there to manage. I think this rather misses the point: programmers also provide a natural language interface to their users, and somehow usually manage the ambiguity and complexity OK.

(This post is a lightly edited version of a Hacker News discussion).

(Mirror of a comment I wrote in response to the question “Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand? How did you deal with it?”)

I inherited a suite of .NET/WinForms applications that managed warehouse shipments to major purchasers. They had been written and modified by a succession of programmers with wildly different opinions of how to write a program (from copy-paste duplication to massively overarchitected inheritance trees; fully denormalized tables to 6th normal form; and everything in between). I was the only software developer at the company, so there was nobody else to ask how any of this worked; I had to figure it all out from scratch. The steps I took were: