Literate programming

The past ten years have witnessed substantial improvements
in programming methodology. This advance,
carried out under the banner of “structured programming,”
has led to programs that are more reliable and
easier to comprehend; yet the results are not entirely
satisfactory. My purpose in the present paper is to
propose another motto that may be appropriate for the
next decade, as we attempt to make further progress
in the state of the art. I believe that the time is ripe
for significantly better documentation of programs, and
that we can best achieve this by considering programs
to be works of literature. Hence, my title: “Literate
Programming.”
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction
of programs: Instead of imagining that our
main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us
concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what
we want a computer to do.