From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-03-18T13:30:29+09:00
Subject: Re: [slightly OT] New O'Reilly book features Matz

Morton Goldberg wrote:
> Re: literate programming
>
> On Mar 17, 2007, at 4:56 AM, Xavier Noria wrote:
>
>> Some friend of mind said by then "it's a beautiful idea that just 
>> does not work".
>
> I disagree. I offer Wolfram Research's Mathematica front end with its 
> notebook interface as an example. My personal experience is that it 
> works very well as a literate programming environment.
>
> It takes a lot of engineering effort to produce a literate programming 
> environment that is relatively easy to use. The developers of such an 
> environment must seamlessly combine a technical-grade word processor 
> with a software IDE. IMO, Wolfram has been able to pull this off.
>
> Regards, Morton
>
>
As have the good folks at the open source Axiom project. Axiom's base 
modus operandi is literate programming. I haven't used Mathematica -- 
it's always been way too expensive for the amount of time I spend doing 
symbolic math. But I do have a Derive license ($200US) and of course 
have both Maxima and Axiom on my Linux systems.

As for a "technical-grade word processor", there are two similar but 
different ones in the open-source world, TeXmacs and LyX. LyX is easier 
to use than TeXmacs and actually has hooks for literate programming 
built in, although it's not as seamless as Mathematica. TeXmacs is more 
powerful -- you can open it up and insert sessions of a number of 
languages, including R, Axiom, Maxima, Guile (Scheme) and Python. A Ruby 
session interface for TeXmacs would make a great Summer of Code project 
(hint hint looking for an opportunity to mentor someone hint hint). :)