Literate Programming: Making Code More Readable

Literate programming, a paradigm invented by Donald Knuth, prioritizes code readability for humans over immediate machine execution. This allows programmers to develop programs in a more natural, thought-driven order. Literate programs interweave natural language explanations with code snippets, enhancing understanding and collaboration. The Literate tool, described here, aims to simplify and extend Knuth and Levy's original CWEB system. It supports multiple languages, syntax highlighting, pretty-printing to HTML, Markdown-based authoring, and offers a command-line interface for compiling code and generating HTML documentation. The project is open-source and welcomes contributions.