devlog

Later i talked to dngnand about journalling, and he showed me a hidden blog where his cvs commit notes are made available in html and RSS. We also talked about literate programming, and his idea of using wiki markup as a way to write literate programs. i enjoyed reading knuth’s original article on literate programming, its concept of the WEB bearing a mild air of prescience.

kragen pointed me at this Purple Number Fad which appears to be going round. Each paragraph or code stanza gets an arbitrary number as an internal href. This makes for interesting possibilities for transclusion of document fragments in different contexts.

idoru mentioned FIT, ward cunningham’s wiki that is also a testing framework. we were thinking about something executable, for example a bot could run from it, that would be both code in wiki and wiki in code. perhaps i’ll work on one, once more of the book’s done.

i’m trying to do more literate style programming now, and finding it takes a lot less conscious introspection than the effect journalling was having, but on the positive side it feels much more fluid, and was actually immediately helpful to me rather than being part of a passive archive. i’d still like to identify both kinds of decisions - the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ - separately, though.