Literate

I recently realised how nice Catenary's source looks on Github. I think it's mostly a coincidence caused by Literate Coffeescript happening to be a subset of Markdown and Github having really nice Markdown rendering.

Honestly looking at it kinda makes me want to write everything using this particular Markdown-as-literate-programming style, even non-Coffeescript projects. It'd be lovely if there was a general tool that let me use any language embedded in Markdown and extract it out in a build step. Though I suppose part of the difficulty is that language would need to be flexible enough that it doesn't limit your ability to write your thoughts in whatever order makes sense.

I know Knuth's original literate programming had a whole metalanguage that let you break completely away from the conventions of the language but in the immortal words of Sweet Brown: ain't nobody got time for that. It feels much cleaner to have something that still looks (mostly) like the original language and keeps its structure.