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Author Archives johan

The textual paradigm

Following up on yesterday’s post on code reuse, I have a more specific reason to be skeptical of literate programming. Programming and software development is stuck in a textual paradigm – the idea that programming is something you do by writing text in a formal language. I think this idea constrains us somewhat in the […]

Posted 01 May 2009 § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Code reuse according to Knuth

I stumbled upon this interview with Donald Knuth today. In addition to the celebrated The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth pioneered the concept of literate programming, which emphasises writing code for human beings to understand, as opposed to writing it for machines to understand. When being asked about current trends and fashionable practices that have […]

Posted 30 April 2009 § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: