Re: [Axiom-developer] Literate Programming -- Knuth interview

[daly]

Tools? The goal of literate programming is communicating from
human to human. It is like writing a novel. All you need is a
working Underwood typewriter and time.

I tend to favor Latex because a lot of math is involved and
Latex prints math well. But I'm presenting a talk about
Literate Programming in North Carolina this week and I plan
to show examples that use XML, html, and video.

Tim

On Tue, 2011-11-08 at 15:03 -0500, Eugene Surowitz wrote:
> That literate programming is fully justified for Axiom is, well, almost 
> axiomatic.
> But the issue is more how to boost the ability to invert the process
> and reverse engineer non-literate code piles into literate documents.
> 
> What, in your opinion, would be the most effective type of tool that could
> be developed to render the literacy project more tractable?
> 
> Eugene J. Surowitz
> 
> On 11/8/2011 9:46 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> >> Yet to me, literate programming is certainly the most important thing
> >> that came out of the TeX project. Not only has it enabled me to write
> >> and maintain programs faster and more reliably than ever before, and
> >> been one of my greatest sources of joy since the 1980s -- it has
> >> actually been indispensable at times. Some of my major programs, such
> >> as the MMIX meta-simulator, could not have been written with any other
> >> methodology that I've ever heard of. The complexity was simply too
> >> daunting for my limited brain to handle; without literate programming,
> >> the whole enterprise would have flopped miserably.
> >>
> >> If people discover nice ways to use the newfangled multithreaded
> >> machines, I would expect the discovery to come from people who
> >> routinely use literate programming. Literate programming is what you
> >> need to rise above the ordinary level of achievement.
> >
> > I believe that Axiom's complexity is large enough to demand literate
> > programming. There are several reasons.
> >
> > First, computational mathematics requires people to be exceptional at
> > mathematics and programming. This is a small subset of already small
> > sets. We might as well add another subset of those who can communicate
> > their ideas in writing.
> >
> > Second, there are many design decisions that are necessary to reduce
> > a mathematical idea to implementation. Some of these design decisions
> > are mathematically arbitrary (e.g. branch cuts) or computationally
> > arbitrary (e.g. sparse versus dense) or programatically arbitrary
> > (e.g. all Spad versus Spad-and-lisp). These design decisions need to
> > be documented so people who maintain and modify the program know why
> > the decisions were made. Without this knowledge it would be trivial
> > to accidently destroy important optimizations.
> >
> > Third, nobody is an expert in the range of mathematics that Axiom can
> > and will implement. It is important to present some portions of the
> > theory associated with domains so people have a clue about the ideas
> > being encoded. Imagine what would happen if all of the math textbooks
> > only contained equations but no human-readable text. You might be able
> > to "read" a calculus textbook but not an infinite group theory textbook.
> >
> > Fourth, a million line program is too large to put into your head. You
> > need to have some background on the data structures, control flow, any
> > special tricks (e.g. funcalls through the symbol-plist), database
> > design, communication protocols (e.g. between Axiom and Hyperdoc and
> > Graphics), parsing structures, and a million other details. At best,
> > the code tells you HOW it does something but not WHY, not what it
> > depends on, not what depends on it, etc.
> >
> > Fifth, a program this large and this long-lived will eventually no
> > longer have the authors around to ask questions. Several of the Axiom
> > authors are already dead and most are not associated with it anymore.
> > Some of those authors are the world's expert in their subject matter.
> > That is a steep hill to climb if you want to understand the code,
> > especially if you have to debug or modify it.
> >
> > Sixth, in the 30 year horizon view, we need to pursue a new level of
> > excellence. As Knuth said:
> >
> >     "Literate programming is what you need to rise above
> >      the ordinary level of achievement"
> >
> > For all these reasons, and more, Axiom needs to be literate.
> >
> > Tim Daly
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > address@hidden
> > https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
> >
> >
> 
> 
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