Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable source code can be generated. - wikipedia
a literate programming environment, simply put, is an environment where prose and code lie in one document. code snippet are spread throughout the document, interupted by blocks of text meant to explain the code. the most popular example of a literate programming environment would be jupyter notebooks.
the next evolution of the jupyter notebook would be an environment with support for:
- programming languages other than python
- easy deploying of documents as code on the web
- testing and interactice input/output demos done in-document
sketch-sh: notebooks for ocaml or reasonml
cool twitter thread
currently thinking about pretty stationery for code...
4GLs are an advancement in typical high-level programming languages. the main difference between 3GL and 4GL is that 4GL only requires the programmer to describe the what, not the how.
a perfect example of this is SQL. a sql query only requires you to describe what data you want, sql will sort out the how itself. which might explain the adoption of sql by folks who wouldn't describe themselves as programmers, or particularly tech saavy.