Literate programming

The title of this blog is a reference to literate programming, a software development methodology founded by Donald Knuth. Literate programming is best described in Knuth's own words:

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.

- Donald Knuth, "Literate Programming" (1984)

I have great affinity for this way of viewing software development. Software design has more in common with the composition of an essay than any strictly scientific activity. I think it's an accident of history that programming is placed within engineering faculties rather than being understood as an outgrowth of philosophy and formal logic.

Literate programming acknowledges software development's place among the humanities. By extension, it acknowledges the relevence of non-scientific ideas to the process of cutting code. Our craft requires the creative and disciplined presentation of thought, so we would be foolhardy to ignore thousands of years of the history of ideas. Programming does not exist inside a vaccuum. Neither should the programmer.

I am not trying to argue that programmers do not need a firm grasp of science. But good programmers cannot rely solely on scientific concepts if they wish their code to be comprehensible to their peers (or future selves).

In the spirit of literate programming I will use this blog to explore software development and its interplay with literature, philosophy, politics and mathematics.