On 8/31/06, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> Another old friend of mine has also coined the rather nice idea of
> "program the document, don't document the program" to cover a concept
> of merging doc and code in the tools so that you can write spec,
> explanation, commentary, examples and limitations mixed in with
> executable code.

Sure, literate programming is a nice idea but even if there is the
wonderful example of TeX to support it I'm not sure it's agile enough
in it's current form to be smalltalker-compliant :-)
The 3 big programs written and published in literate style that I can
think of are counter examples IMHO because they were written by one
(or very few) people and are not meant to evolve very much if at all:
TeX and metafont were frozen by D.E.K long ago, and pbrt is published
more as teaching material than as a competitive renderer
(http://pbrt.org).
However I'd really like to be convinced that it can actually work for
fast-moving and widely collaborative projects.

What would a documentation debugger look like ?

> late Jef Raskin's idea of The Humane Interface (see http://
> www.raskincenter.org) and it wouldn't be too awful implemented as a
> nice document editor that has a style for 'source code' that actually
> means source code rather than just using a fixed pitch font. Hmm, now

A mix of a smalltalk browser and a wiki ?

> where might we find a document editor with intimate associations with
> a compiler?

emacs :D

-- 
 Damien Pollet
 type less, do more