Damien Pollet schrieb:
> 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 :-)
A long time ago, when I re-implemented a big chunk of TeX in VisualWorks
to create a WYSIWYG TeX editor (WysiTeX), we tried to do something like
literate programming in Smalltalk. My idea was that a Smalltalk literate
program could not possibly have the form of a linear book, since
Smalltalk programs are essentially not linear, so we tried to create a
hyperlinked documentation (using a collaborative hypertext editor also
written in VisualWorks). I was not really satisfied with the result - it
did not have the close linkage to the code, and I don't think that an
outsider would have been able to grok our code with the help of this doc
bettern than without it.

That said, I still feel that something like that would be needed. Since
working with Objectory a number of years ago, I became enamoured with
the idea of traceability - having explicit links between analysis,
design and code. Objectory was a little too waterfallish, an agile tool
would probably have to look a bit different, but still I think that a
really good development environment should be able to keep all this
information in one place, allowing me to create and follow links, to
store document files, drawings, diagrams as well as runtime, building
and test code in one place, with version history all over the place, too.

I know that such a system would not help me much in writing better
method comments (that's still a matter of discipline which I'm a bit
lacking) but it would probably allow me to create overview documents
which allow others to get into the code much more easily.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin