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Original Post: Literate programming is now a team sport
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In the mid-1980s I worked for a company that squandered a goodly number of tax dollars on a software project for the Army. Do horrors spring to mind when you hear the phrase "milspec software"? It was even worse. My gig was milspec software documentation.
We produced some architectural docs, but our output was dwarfed by piles of that era's precursor to Javadoc: boilerplate extracted from source code. During one meeting, the head of the doc team thudded a two-foot-thick mound of the stuff onto the table and said: "This means nothing to anyone."
Meanwhile, we were following the adventures of Donald Knuth, who was developing an idea he called literate programming. A program, he said, was a story told in two languages: code and prose. You needed to be able to write both at the same time, and in a way that elevated the prose to equal status with the code. Ideas were explored in prose narration, at varying levels of abstraction, then gradually fleshed out in code.
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