Literate Programming
Source: Literate Programming, Knuth 1984
In “Literate Programming,” Knuth attempts to introduce a method of programming wherein programmers code with humans in mind rather than machines. To accomplish human readability, Knuth proposes use of source code and text in chunks, and demonstrates this idea through their language WEB by writing basic programs such as generating prime numbers.
“Literate Programming” and the WEB language are important to today’s programmers, data scientists, and data visualizers because it was the first step towards text-code combinations such as Jupyter notebooks or RMarkdown that are widely used today. I find the combination of source code and text attractive because it place comments and explanations of code at the forefront. By placing text as a partner to code, programmers may keep human readability in mind more than they would if they could postpone explanation to a simple comment later. Additionally, a text-code combination allows code to feel less intimidating to newcomers and more similar to the potentially more comfortable essay.