Posted by Kelsie Ferin
For this week’s blog posy, we watched Knuth’s talk at useR!2016 “Literate Programming”. Knuth describes literate programming as considering your computer programs as literature. What he means by this is that you want to write your code in a way for people to read and understand, not just a computer. To do this, the code needs to be presented in a way that is understandable and explains why we are doing it this way. One thing Knuth mentioned is that we need to write in smaller chunks and put them together to be more efficient in our writing and prevent errors. We can see these today, even in our class, in RMarkdown. We are able to write and code in the same document and chunk up the code into smaller sections to prevent errors and analyze separately. The main difference that I see between his vision and our current reality is that debugging code still takes a lot of time to complete. Even when the original program may be able to pick out some things, we still have to go through and interpret everything.