Re: [Axiom-developer] Literate programming

[Daniel Jomphe]

I would gladly pay for such a thing to materialize on my screen; if it only took money to get that, I'm sure we'd all be willing to finance such an effort however we can.

On Thursday, October 27, 2011 1:58:52 PM UTC-4, TimDaly wrote:

So imagine a world where the eloquence of Rich Hickey was expressed in
book form. Imagine the whole immutability lecture written down and
decorated with the actual running code as illustration. Imagine that
the original authors clearly explained software transactional memory
and illustrated it with the actual code. Imagine a discussion of
argument destructuring with running code illustrations.

How many more people would be able to dive into the details of Clojure
to maintain and modify the code? How many people would find it much
easier to understand prototypes, defrecords, macros, and all of the
other struggles that populate the current email forums? How are
infinite sequences supported and what code supports it? What does
NIL mean and why was it defined that way?

We do not capture the ideas. We do not rewrite the explanations to
clarify the fine points of confusion. We do not illustrate how the
ideas of Red-Black tries are moved "from ideas to implementation".
We do not communicate the ideas to each other. We code for the machine.

... 

Now imagine that the "book" is multimedia where you can include

animation (watch the tree balance), video, and a running REPL.
Think Khan Academy for Clojure.

This community is willing to overthrow the traditional ideas of lisp
in order to make progress on a new path. Yet we continue to structure
the development as though we worked on a PDP 11/40 with 4k file size
limits. We continue to let the most valuable information which is the
meat of Clojure disappear while we keep only the code, the bones of
Clojure.