Maintaining credit with your reader is an essential component of good writing - "Literate Programming" lost credability from the onset. Foremost, the preface was an absolute joke. Three consecutive paragraphs stated EXACTLY the same thing about reading and writing computers being rewarding. In the introduction of the piece, the author outright stated that the reader should ignore most everything he said because he is a fanatic. Persuasive prose this is not.

When dealing with the material at hand, it seems that the author was a proponent of extensive commenting. His belief in the beauty of reading a computer program showed that he liked to see exactly what was going on at all times. The inclusion of the program completely baffled me. What was the pascal and what was the TeX and how it was all incorporated was very confusing. Furthermore, the author felt strange that he was using WEB when doing programs solely for his own edification. This is in direct contrast with what we try to teach here in cs15 - that documentation is more for the author than anyone else.

I believe that this article is out of date. For one, saying that WEB is one of the few three letter words NOT associated with computers is very telling. 19 years ago, when this author was working, perhaps commenting was new to the industry (see Millenium Problem), but it seems that creating a huge system for commenting that slows down performance (in a trade off with debugging) infers that commenting is not a common practice. I guess this response shows how brainwashed I've been by Brown and cs15, but the thought of commenting not being a part of a program is unheard of to me.

MY COMMENTS: I utterly agree with Saul and think the rest of you either lost the point or else I missed it big time.

MY COMMENTS: I think that you are a little overly critical in judging the author on his assumptions. While we as an educational institution _strongly_ encourage commenting, as stated in other reactions, it is not done nearly enough. Most large programs are not documented well-enough to understand them unless you are thoroughly familiar with the program already. Having a tool to aid the process is a good idea, I just think that Knuth makes things more complicated than anything else.