• http://www.agilebuddha.com/agile/agile-thinking-stop-starting-start-finishing/
• http://www.allaboutagile.com/stop-starting-start-finishing-unfinished-work-is-debt/
• http://www.leanagiletraining.com/key-problems/stop-starting-start-finishing/

I blog. I write books. I write code. There are profound tool-chain issues in all three of these. Mostly, I'm tired of shabby "What You See Is All You Get" editing.

First. I use this blogger site as well as a Jive-based site at work. They're handy. But. There are …

I remain captivated by the ideals of Literate Programming. My fork of PyLit (https://github.com/slott56/PyLit-3) coupled with Sphinx seems to handle LP programming in a very elegant way.

It works like this.

1. Write RST files describing the problem and the solution. This includes the actual implementation code …

Updates completed. See https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywebtool/ and http://pywebtool.sourceforge.net.

The list of changes is extensive.

However, the essential API and the markup language for creating literate programs hasn't (significantly) changed. A few experimental features were replaced with a first-class implementation.

The interesting (to me) bit is …

I've revised PyLit to work with Python3. See https://github.com/slott56/PyLit-3 The code seems to pass all the unit tests. The changes include Python3 revisions, plus a small change to handle trailing spaces in a sightly cleaner fashion. This was necessary because I have most of my editors …

Even though I wrote a literate programming tool (PyWeb) I slowly came to realize that it's not very good.

Mostly, I followed the Web/Weave world view and cribbed their markup syntax. It's not bad, but, the PyWeb markup is based on some presumptions about literate programming that were, perhaps …

I've (finally) updated the pyWeb Literate Programming Tool.

There were feature requests and bug reports. Much to do. Sadly, I'm really slow at doing it.

pyWeb Literate Programming Tool | Download pyWeb Literate Programming Tool software for free at SourceForge.net

My bias is toward "printable" documents. I like the idea of an HTML document that is directly printable. I've used tools like Flying Saucer (and appropriate CSS) to guarantee printability.

I like using ReStructured Text to create HTML and LaTeX that match precisely.

When I think of Literate Programming, I'm …

About a decade ago, I discovered the concept of Literate Programming. It's seductive. The idea is to write elegant documentation that embeds the actual working code.

For tricky, complex, high-visibility components, a literate programming approach can give people confidence that the software actually works as advertised.

I actually wrote my …