On the connections between math and programming page, Aaron linked to a page giving the text of a talk by Adam Bosworth. I wanted to respond, but in a new spot, because the issues here seem somewhat different.
The link text on the aforementioned page was
The Bosworth article was mentioned in a discussion about literate programming. We can agree that literate programming tools in Noosphere would be used primarily by fairly "non-average" PM users. As Knuth has said, literate programming caters to the "elite" group of people, who can both write and program and, especially, those who can (or who want to) do both well.
But I don't think that it is any more "formal" than other programming interfaces, indeed, it may be a bit less formal, since you can always break into prose - and have that work. Furthermore, doing collaborative literate programming is something else again. I don't think that collaborative literate programming is "formal" in the sense that Bosworth meant by that word. Rather, it is "sloppy" - it promotes things like discussions about the code, branching off (in a hypertext environment, especially) to look at other examples, and other very "natural" ways of doing, thinking about, and interacting with others about programming.
As long as you're willing to accept the idea that some software tool need not be that popular to be good, I think literate programming is way up on the list of good interfaces. Furthermore, I think that if it was added to Noosphere, its popularity as an interface would tend to grow – e.g. to everyone involved with writing PlanetComputing! --jcorneli Tue Mar 29 16:31:05 2005 UTC