in reply to Re: An Introduction to Literate Programming with perlWEB
in thread An Introduction to Literate Programming with perlWEB

I can second this. I used LP techniques using FunnelWeb on a project in the past, and due to a learning curve with LP, the issues related to not using LP all of the time, and, at least for someone who has been writing code (not necessarily professionally) for over 20 years, just being "not natural", the cost associated with the initial write and now maintenance has made me determine that the next time I need to touch that code that I am rewriting it in more of a "classical" style.

I much prefer something along the lines of NaturalDocs for helping me with my documentation (although I wish that it integrated more fully with POD - perhaps the newer versions do), and more of a classical approach to coding structure.

One thing that really turned me off to FunnelWeb's implementation of LP, and LP in general (perhaps too broad of a brush, perhaps not), was changing, from the programmers perspective, the edit, execute, repeat cycle and replacing it with an edit, compile, execute, repeat cycle. Adding that extra step increased development time somewhat, and hassle significantly.

In certain domains, LP may be the right tool, and while there were some nice things from using LP, but I will need someone else to convince me that it is worth trying it again, since the use of LP was a net loss in productivity, at least in the situation I used it.

--MidLifeXis

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Re^3: An Introduction to Literate Programming with perlWEB
by Jenda (Abbot) on Jan 13, 2009 at 15:29 UTC

    Not sure how long does it take FunnelWeb to "compile" a file, but quite likely you could create a daemon/service that'd watch the source directories and compile the modified files automatically as soon as they are saved.

    We use something like that for i18n.

      I am redoing our build environment, so perhaps I will relent and take another look at it. IIRC (it has been a couple of years since I had to maintain the one app that I used FW on), the compile did not take an overly significant amount of time, but it was a different (and quite unfamiliar) way to do things.

      --MidLifeXis