Quote by Knuth

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Monday, July 19, 2021 at 11:25 AM
> From: "Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor" <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Quote by Knuth
>
> Christopher Dimech wrote:
>
> > But Knuth idea goes more than that because he was obsessed
> > with presentation and wanted science to be like a work of
> > literature. Without understanding that most work is not work
> > of literature.
>
> But that's very normal and, broadly speaking, expected for
> a man with the turns that his career took. What would you
> expect, the creator of TeX saying, "hey, why do you guys care
> so much what the documents _look_ like?" ???
>
> Well, _he_ for one cared about that and he developed a good
> tool for that!
>
> "Literate programming" was his way of theorizing about TeX and
> the family of tools and methods he developed, pushed for, and
> cared for. I understand that now, it wasn't hyped as
> a superior model for programming in general. Then it makes
> much more sense.

He and some others tried published some papers on literate programming,
but the results were not as great as they had thought things would be.
Things got complicated when working on real programming tasks.  It is
mostly others around him who hyped literate programming as a super model.
It should also be said that he did not do so much programming and mathematics
himself.  As often in today's academia, it was his students and assistants
who worked the most on his ideas.

If you can make something more literate, one should go ahead; but pragmatism
and good design must be the focus.

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