Better Literate Programming

First, several big updates recently to the original version of lit, my agnostic tool for literate programming.
  1. It can now preserve correct line numbers for debugging, which is the killer feature I’ve been trying to figure out; this is the only reason I haven’t written all my source code in this format for the past couple years.
  2. You can pipe the processed content over stdin/stdout instead of just writing files to disk, which should enable any shenanigans you want to wire up that I have not anticipated.
  3. Best of all, thanks to some logging tricks it also lets you actually execute Markdown documents. Usage would be something like this:
    
    # use Python to execute the fenced code blocks inside script.py.md
    $ python $(./lit.sh --input "script.py.md" --before "#")
    

In addition, I’ve reimplemented the same core logic as a Rollup plugin. This is optimized for JavaScript, supports sourcemaps for debugging, and can be delivered via npm with semantic versioning for dependency management.

Literate Programming

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of coding in CoffeeScript, which is a very elegant language, but my favorite feature is actually just a workflow. Instead of first coding and then later annotating the code, with “literate mode” you first write out descriptions of your logical structures, and then inside that framework you start to embed the executable code. It’s a very interesting way of working, so a few days ago I put together a small shell script which allows me to apply a “literate” workflow to any other kind of code.

memento.js

I mostly threw together that last post so I could clear my plate for some new action happening over on GitHub: memento.js, which binds data sets along a timeline for dynamic recall during media playback.

My excitement about this code cannot be overstated.

D3 Text Wrapping

It’s been more than a year since I posted it on GitHub<, so I suppose I should finally acknowledge the existence of my text wrapping plugin for D3.js. It has already been discovered by some folks (including Mike Bostock, who enthusiastically described it as “generalized somewhat.”) Gregor Aisch’s d3-jetpack also contains a simpler implementation of this feature based on counting characters instead of measuring the width of the rendered text.

GitHub

I wrote an article for the New Yorker about the popular collaborative coding platform GitHub:

GitHub allowed coders to collaborate easily over the Internet, providing messaging and social features that would feel familiar to current users of social networks—for example, the ability to follow particular chunks of code in projects the way one might follow people on Twitter. The primary difference is that on GitHub the users share code, not photos and LOLcats.

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