Literate Programming

Knuth's argument is radical and still undigested: a program should be written as an essay addressed to human readers, with the machine-executable parts woven in. Documentation and code are not two artefacts but one. The paper introduced the WEB system, where the programmer writes prose that explains the reasoning and the compiler extracts the instructions. This connects directly to Peter Naur's idea that programming is theory building — if the theory dies when the original developers leave, no amount of inline comments will resurrect it. For anyone directing product teams, the implication is that code quality is fundamentally a communication problem, not a tooling problem.