I stumbled upon this interview with Donald Knuth today. In addition to the celebrated The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth pioneered the concept of literate programming, which emphasises writing code for human beings to understand, as opposed to writing it for machines to understand.
When being asked about current trends and fashionable practices that have undeserved popularity, Knuth says:
I must also confess to a strong bias against the fashion for reusable code.
His take, then, is that with highly readable, modifiable and accessible source code, reuse is unnecessary and dangerous. He would prefer rewriting the code for a new context.
I am one of those who would preach the “fashion” of reusable code. It does appear to me that reusability is very important, and in particular, I think there are tremendous benefits to be realised when the language implementation is able to reason about code. The success of languages like Java shows that the more managed and controlled the language is, the more human creativity and mental capacity is free to focus on the higher levels of abstraction. If programmers must adapt code to each context manually, surely they will be distracted from the bigger task. So my take on the issue is very different to Knuth’s.
But I confess to not knowing much about literate programming and to not having explored the tools (in particular Knuth’s CWEB). Perhaps I should learn more.
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