Literate programming

I thought it was funny reading about "literate programming" or "web" code, which is not as in "World Wide Web", but a method and tool set for mixing programming instructions and documentation. The way they talks about it is something like "if you're not using this, your competitors soon will be, and they will leave you in the dust". The idea is to keep your documentation and code together so that updating one reminds you to do the other. The trouble is that the idea results in clunky and hard to read documents.

In the meantime C# and Java have arisen with support for much more readable documentation in their code, though not to the same degree that Knuth proposed. And you know what? It's enough. The C# and Java inline documentation serves us well enough to document our code most of the time and still leaves us with readable code that compiles without running it through another tool first. Small compromise, big win.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am not aware of anyone outside academia using these tools.
PPS - Then again, I don't know everyone.