I recently wrote a post about how I was using Literate Programming principles in Org-mode to write the unit tests of my applications side-by-side with the code it tests. I got some good feedbacks about the post, however one that particularly caught my eye is a blog post on the Irreal blog which states:
One possible problem with this procedure is if you’re working in a team and not everyone is an Emacs user. Non Emacs users won’t be keen to tangle an Org document to get the code and probably won’t feel comfortable making changes to an Org file. Unless everyone you’re working with is an Emacs user or you’re working alone, this means that Giasson’s workflow will have to be limited to initial development. Still, it’s a powerful technique and well worth experimenting with.
It is not the first time I have read such observation about Literate Programming (and Org-mode & Emacs). This is certainly a right and legitimate concern. Literate Programming is a set of concepts and principles with two actions at its core: weaving (generating human readable version of the application) and tangling (generating the computer code of the application) [a literate document]. The literate document has to comply with some syntax to determine what needs to be weaved and what needs to be tangled. This syntax needs to be implemented in a development environment to be usable. It could be fully integrate (like with Org-mode) or part of a development workflow (like CWEB). It is for this reason that there may be a possible problem: because the way to write a software application is inherently different than how we learned to program and it requires some specific development environments or workflows. This is fine if there is only one developer on the application or only a few that already use the same environment.