Optimal Emacs Settings for Org-mode for Literate Programming

Frederick Giasson

For some time I have been interested in using Emacs and Org-mode for developing Clojure in a Literate Programming way. I discussed the basic ideas, some of the benefits of doing so, etc, etc. It is now time to start showing how I am doing this, what are the rules of thumb I created, what is the structure of my programs, etc.

However, before I start writing about any of this, I think the next step is to explain how I configured Org-mode to have a frictionless experience to develop my applications in Literate Programming using Org-mode. Then in a subsequent series of blog posts I will explain how I structured my Clojure project, what is my development workflow, etc.

Note that if you don’t have Emacs setup for Clojure/Cider, I would encourage you to read this other blog post which explains how to setup a Clojure environment in Emacs.

This is the first post of a series of blog posts that will cover the full workflow. I will demonstrate how I do Literate Programming for developing a Clojure application, but exactly the same workflow would work for any other programming language supported by Org-mode (Python, R, etc.). The only thing that is required is to adapt the principles to the project structures in these other languages. The series of blog posts will cover:

  1. Configuring Emacs for Org-mode (this post)
  2. Project folder structure
  3. Anatomy of a Org-mode file
  4. Tangling all project files
  5. Publishing documentation in multiple formats
  6. Unit Testing

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Literate Programming and Team Development

Frederick Giasson

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.

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Creating and Running Unit Tests Directly in Source Files with Org-mode

Frederick Giasson

Developing a computer program is not an easy task. The process needs a constant focus. Any interruption of that process means that time is spent re-focusing on it and errors are more prone to be introduced. The process involves analyzing a problem to solve by executing a series of steps. It involves writing about the problem we are trying to solve and writing about the solution we found to solve it. Finally it involves writing test procedures that can run to make sure that the current state of the implementation of the solution behaves as expected and that expected behavior is not altered by subsequent modifications.

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My Literate Programming Commitment

Frederick Giasson

From now on, I make the commitment that everything new I will produce is literate programming code.

The Open Source Revolution

For about a decade, we are experiencing a kind of Open Source revolution with the rise of Git (and all its free online hosting services such as GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab). At the same time the tech Juggernaut like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Baidu, Twitter and probably all others are increasing their commitment to release several of their internal projects as open source software. There is also a myriad of young and vibrant communities that get created around new programming languages such as Clojure, Scala, R and many others. More and more code is available to people to look at and for developers to use.

My company Structured Dynamics and I are participants of that movement for more than fifteen years, producing open source software, ontologies, datasets and participating into other open source projects by fixing bugs and adding functionalities.

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