Editing Literate programming (section)

=== Advantages ===
According to Knuth,<ref name="Knuth">{{Cite web |last1=Knuth |first1=Donald E. |author-link=Donald Knuth |last2=Binstock |first2=Andrew |date=April 25, 2008 |title=Interview with Donald Knuth |url= https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 |access-date=January 4, 2009 |quote=Yet to me, literate programming is certainly the most important thing that came out of the [[TeX]] project. Not only has it enabled me to write and maintain programs faster and more reliably than ever before, and been one of my greatest sources of joy since the 1980s-it has actually been indispensable at times. Some of my major programs, such as the MMIX meta-simulator, could not have been written with any other methodology that I've ever heard of. The complexity was simply too daunting for my limited brain to handle; without literate programming, the whole enterprise would have flopped miserably.&nbsp;... Literate programming is what you need to rise above the ordinary level of achievement.}}</ref><ref>{{block quote|Another surprising thing that I learned while using WEB was that traditional programming languages had been causing me to write inferior programs, although I hadn't realized what I was doing. My original idea was that WEB would be merely a tool for documentation, but I actually found that my WEB programs were better than the programs I had been writing in other languages.
 |sign=[[Donald Knuth|Donald E. Knuth]]
 |source=''Literate Programming''{{ref label|TCJ_LP|1|x}}
}}</ref>
literate programming provides higher-quality programs, since it forces programmers to explicitly state the thoughts behind the program, making poorly thought-out design decisions more obvious. Knuth also claims that literate programming provides a first-rate documentation system, which is not an add-on, but is grown naturally in the process of exposition of one's thoughts during a program's creation.<ref>{{block quote|Thus the WEB language allows a person to express programs in a ''"stream of consciousness" order''. TANGLE is able to scramble everything up into the arrangement that a PASCAL compiler demands. This feature of WEB is perhaps its greatest asset; it makes a WEB-written program much more readable than the same program written purely in PASCAL, even if the latter program is well commented. And the fact that there's no need to be hung up on the question of top-down versus bottom-up, since a programmer can now ''view a large program as a web, to be explored in a '''psychologically correct order''' is perhaps the greatest lesson'' I have learned from my recent experiences.
 |sign=[[Donald Knuth|Donald E. Knuth]]
 |source=''Literate Programming''{{ref label|TCJ_LP|1|y}}
}}</ref> The resulting documentation allows the author to restart their own thought processes at any later time, and allows other programmers to understand the construction of the program more easily. This differs from traditional documentation, in which a programmer is presented with source code that follows a compiler-imposed order, and must decipher the thought process behind the program from the code and its associated comments. The meta-language capabilities of literate programming are also claimed to facilitate thinking, giving a higher "bird's eye view" of the code and increasing the number of concepts the mind can successfully retain and process. Applicability of the concept to programming on a large scale, that of commercial-grade programs, is proven by an edition of [[TeX]] code as a literate program.<ref name="Knuth" />

Knuth also claims that literate programming can lead to easy porting of software to multiple environments, and even cites the implementation of TeX as an example.<ref>{{Cite web |title="Oral History of Donald Knuth"- an Interview with Ed Feigenbaum |url= http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Knuth_Don_1/Knuth_Don.oral_history.2007.102658053_all.pdf |access-date=December 7, 2018 |website=Archive.ComputerHistory.org}}</ref>