Literate programming is the artform of making well-documented programs. The term was coined by Donald Knuth, the inventor of TeX. In fact, he wrote the source code for TeX and its sidekick, METAFONT as literate programs and published the source code as books entitled TeX: The Program and METAFONT: The Program.
Although it isn't really about literate programming per-se, I thought it might be worth including a link to this description of the Muse package for Emacs here. The idea with Muse is to be able to seamlessly generate lots of different kinds of documents from one source document.
As someone who has tried to convert from format to format (e.g. LaTeX to Texinfo, or even LaTeX to PDF (not usually very hard of course, but something of a challenge in a big project like FEM)) I can appreciate what the Muse author is trying to do. I thought this mode might be interesting for people thinking about how to improve Noösphere – it would be cool to be able to instantly generate a PM article or whole copy of PM in some preferred format. Of course, the later is one of the long-term goals of the FEM.
However, I think it is important for format-interchangability to be given more consideration in future versions of Noösphere as well. --jcorneli Sun Feb 13 20:37:17 2005
It is useful to license literate programs under both the FDL and GPL so that both the text and program components are free. (The idea that AM might be a good place for literate programming influenced my decision to use these licensing terms.)
There's a section on Literate Programming in the classic "Mathematical Writing" report by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy L. Larrabee, Paul M. Roberts.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/klr.html
The TeX? source of the report is downloadable at this page. I would post a PDF version of it also, but unfortunately there is explicit permission statement allowing me to do so, so you just have to manually run TeX? on the file yourself. --SteveCheng