HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Title is a little (?) clickbait... Promoting a YOW talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATobswwFwQA

-- The other day I was talking with a friend about structured editing and literate programming came up. LP was one of Donald Knuth's ideas, to structure programs as readable documents instead of just machine docs. He was interested in it, I was cautiously skeptical. We both knew the famous story about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

"In 1986, Jon Bentley asked Knuth to demonstrate the concept of literate programming by writing a program in WEB. Knuth came up with an 8-pages long monolithic listing that was published together with a critique by Douglas McIlroy of Bell Labs. McIlroy praised intricacy of Knuth's solution, his choice of a data structure (Frank M. Liang's hash trie), but noted that more practical, much faster to implement, debug and modify solution of the problem takes only six lines of shell script by reusing standard Unix utilities. McIlroy concluded: >>Knuth has shown us here how to program intelligibly, but not wisely. I buy the discipline. I do not buy the result. He has fashioned a sort of industrial-strength Faberge egg—intricate, wonderfully worked, refined beyond all ordinary desires, a museum piece from the start."

The program was print out the top K most-used words in a text. (and so it goes on...) ---

⬐ hwayne

To clarify, it was an email newsletter. The YOW! thing had just gotten published so I got that out of the way before diving into the meat of the newsletter post, which was about LP.