Computers & Typesetting, Volume B: TeX

What Hacker News says

1. acqqFeb 2020
   The TeX source is not in the form in which it is intended to be read. It's like you showing the current HTML and JavaScript source code of some article and complain that the message is hard to read.

   What you showed as the TeX source is at the same time a source representation for this book:

   Computers & Typesetting, Volume B: TeX: The Program (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1986), ISBN 0-201-13437-3

   and at the same time the "plain" Pascal program can be extracted from that same source representation(1)

   That was the idea of Literate Programming that Knuth also tried to demonstrate in his article as he was "framed."

   Which other program that is hard to develop (that one took 10 years of the best programmer in the world, supported by his students and assistants) has a nicely printed book form that fits 600 pages and has all the descriptions?

   Even more impressive, Knuth intentionally developed his program with the specific idea that its outputs are the same no matter how much the computers change in the future. And he managed to achieve this -- the more ports of his original program are available everywhere and using his sources from eighties produce exactly same pages as then.

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   1) "WEB programs are converted to Pascal sources by tangle and to a TeX input file by weave. Of course, tangle and weave are WEB programs as well. So one needs tangle to build tangle---and weave and TeX to read a beautifully typeset WEB program" -- that is, if you don't buy a book which is already typeset and printed.

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2. todd8Sep 2016
   Yes, the iPython notebooks are great for reproducible reports. Literate programming, as practiced by Knuth, is a little bit different. The program's output, graphs, tables, etc. isn't intermixed with the text as it is in a Jupyer notebook. A literate program is actually documentation and source mixed together in a web file. Two different programs (tangle and weave) can be run over this literate code. One extracts a (LaTeX) document suitable for publication and the other extracts a program (with all of the documentation stripped out) to be fed into a compiler. The best example I know of is Computers & Typesetting, Volume B: TeX: The Program [1], a 624 page book that is a complete exposition on the TeX program, generated by weave; the same web source run through tangle generates the TeX program itself (the typesetting program upon which LaTeX is built out of TeX macros).

   Knuth is a fan of this method of program construction. Of course, he is not only a phenomenal programmer; he is a great writer skilled at explaining complex algorithms and code. I can see why literate programming suits him.

   [1] https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-B-TeX-Program/d...

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3. zzo38Dec 2010
   I read the entire book "TeX: The Program" by Donald Knuth, Computers and Typesetting, Volume B.
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