geom

This comment would make sense if Knuth used literate programming primarily for academic papers. But in fact he created WEB for writing TeX and METAFONT, both of which (while their source code was published as a book later) were production systems, and in fact for several decades now he uses CWEB for all programs he writes, including several a week that he writes for himself. (Some of which are online at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html .) In contrast, apart from the paper he wrote introducing LP, and the two Bentley columns about LP in CACM, I'm not aware of any other academic paper of his that presents programs — at any rate, the total number must be very small. The goal is not an "academic paper"; his experience (and that of others who have seriously tried LP) is that it helps with actual writing of programs, less time spent

that still needs to call JS though... It's not like they rewrote the renderer in Clojure A simpler and easy to grok alternative with minimal dependencies is thing-geom https://github.com/thi-ng/geom/blob/master/geom-viz/src/core... You just declare what you want drawn and you get back an svg tree which you can either modify further or transform to xml to get an actual .svg format string It's very unopinionated and can be easily inserted in both Clojure and Clojurescript applications. You can render with the browser, webview, batik, svgsalamander or I even quickly wrote a converter to Javafx bc I have the svg tree I can directly traverse

The geom library is amazing! Client-side and server-side generation of charts with same code. The documentation is also great. The project was written in a Literate Programming style. These turned out to be an obstacle for contributions, so there is an ongoing effort to migrate the code out of that. You can find the latest version on this branch: https://github.com/thi-ng/geom/tree/feature/no-org

By the guy behind the thing/geom library: https://github.com/thi-ng/geom/ Check out the examples, it's very pretty. The little I've played with it it's been incredibly ergonomic and fun, in the hiccup-style you see in Clojure. Haven't come across anything like it in other languages

Author here: Agreed & most parts of this particular project aren't really the best example. With other (newer) projects I embraced the LP style much more, and in fact by now really often first write the prose parts to get my head clear about a certain aspect and only then start writing code, e.g. https://github.com/thi-ng/fabric/blob/master/fabric-facts/sr... https://github.com/thi-ng/geom/blob/develop/src/viz/core.org As for the docstrings included in the core, this is largely to address complains from other users, who are used to have docs available in the REPL and I often don't have the resources/time to provide both org-mode and docstrings...

I see that this is a honorable goal, but in this particular project the source looks more like source than documentation. An extreme example is this part, where the code even contains function docstrings, rather than having the docstring as part of the surrounding document: https://github.com/thi-ng/geom/blob/master/geom-core/src/mat... This is an effect which I observed with my own literate programming attempts, too: They quickly end up with large documents that contain lots of code listings and not much explaination.

Literate programming is a thing that's long piqued my interest, but it usually seems more suited to academic or personal use. Having said that, a beautiful example of LP in the wild is geom[0], a Clojure/Clojurescript library written entirely in org-mode. Browsing through the source, I have to keep reminding myself that I'm looking at the code and not just the documentation. [0] https://github.com/thi-ng/geom

Literate programming with the source code in Emacs org-mode. Example of raw source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thi-ng/geom/master/geom-ty... Shows up on Github as: https://github.com/thi-ng/geom/blob/master/geom-types/src/be...

toxi's thi-ng/geom[1] library deserves a mention in this space. [1]: https://github.com/thi-ng/geom