Monomorphic

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 development of languages and tools. IDE’s like Eclipse allow you to perform operations on the abstract syntax tree to some extent (e.g. automated refactorings), but in general, those too are text oriented.

I don’t have a replacement for the textual paradigm today. Because of the strong link between languages and automata, clearly computer programming is very strongly related to formal languages. But sentences in formal languages don’t need to be represented as text. 

However, I don’t think I want to advocate leaving text behind completely. It is one of the most powerful devices for input and output of precise information, to and from people and computers. But I think we need to take steps towards being less about text editing, and literate programming  does not seem to permit that.