Editing Donald Knuth (section)

===Literate programming===
While developing TeX, Knuth created a new methodology of programming, which he called [[literate programming]], because he believed that programmers should think of programs as works of literature:

{{blockquote|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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf |title=Literate Programming |last=Knuth |first=Donald Erwin |year=1984 |access-date=2020-03-26 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190819211815/http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf |archive-date=2019-08-19 |url-status=dead }}</ref>}}

Knuth embodied the idea of literate programming in the [[WEB]] system. The same WEB source is used to ''weave'' a TeX file, and to ''tangle'' a [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]] source file. These in their turn produce a readable description of the program and an executable binary respectively. A later iteration of the system, [[CWEB]], replaces Pascal with [[C (programming language)|C]], [[C++]], and [[Java (programming language)|Java]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html|title=Knuth and Levy: CWEB}}</ref>

Knuth used WEB to program TeX and METAFONT, and published both programs as books, both originally published the same year: ''TeX: The Program'' (1986); and ''METAFONT: The Program'' (1986).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html |title=Knuth: Computers and Typesetting |website=www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu |access-date=2019-07-19 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190411233455/https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html |archive-date=2019-04-11 |date=2019-04-11 |url-status=dead |first=Donald |last=Knuth }}</ref>  Around the same time, [[LaTeX]], the now-widely adopted macro package based on TeX, was first developed by [[Leslie Lamport]], who later published its first user manual in 1986.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lamport |first=Leslie |url=https://archive.org/details/latex00lesl |title=LATEX : a document preparation system |date=1986 |publisher=Addison-Wesley Pub. Co |isbn=020115790X |oclc=12550262 |url-access=registration}}</ref>