Re: [Axiom-developer] Axiom, FriCAS, forks and teeth

[Bill Page]

While we are dragging this thread further into the merits/demerits of
literate programming, I thought I would mention one alternative to
literate programming that seems in comparison to be quite mainstream:
using visualization to improve the comprehensibility of software. See
for example:

http://www.jgrasp.org

I would *love* to have a tool like this for Axiom that also understood
and could navigate the Axiom library.

Part of the idea here is that programs themselves can be made more
directly comprehensible by human beings rather than making programming
equivalent to writing a research paper and then providing tools to
extract the embedded code in a form usable by a computer. One
advantage of this is that such tools can be layered on top of
traditional programming methodologies without change (much) the way
programmers work.

Ultimately of course the tools one uses tends to affect the way one
works, so if the goal is to move to more literate programming then one
approach would be to look for tools which "gently" encourage
programmers to work in this manner (but do not require it from the
get-go).

Regards,
Bill Page.