This is just me, but when I read through the literate programming book, and the hundred or so pages of literate code resulted in a program that could be replaced with a line of bash script, I decided that writing the program succinctly was more important than writing a novel to accompany it.
Uhm, I write literate code exactly because my code is very compact so I can afford to dilute it with an equal amount of prose. And, yes, I still prefer to print the whole thing and work with a paper rather than in any IDE.
> I write literate code exactly because my code is very compact so I can afford to dilute it with an equal amount of prose.
That I can get behind. My concern with the example in the book was, it didn't matter how good the prose was, the program would be nowhere near as understandable as the one line of bash, just due to there being 0.1% as much code to understand. And I realize that it's not a meaningful knock against literate programming as a whole, it was a bad example that soured the idea in my head. It made me more concerned about succinct, understandable code, rather than seeing the prose as sufficient.
