Literate sorting visualizer 😎

I must disclose that I have been infected by the dream that Donald E. Knuth wanted to give us with the Literate Programming paradigm. Many decades have passed since his original papers and the book that archives all of those papers into a nice piece of literature.

I would say that for me, Literate Programming is the way that we should think about writing software and code. Such that we ought to address our programs to people and not to machines. Programming itself should be regarded as a process of writing essays, therefore considered as a process of creating works of literature, which are meant to be read. (the book above says is better)

Many aspiring computer scientists and programmers have the audacity to say that one can be a good software developer without knowing how to write properly or do math rigorously. Both of those claims to me are quite outrageous. Those are the foundations of our field and what we are.

Below is a link to a simple terminal-based sorting algorithm visualizer I wrote in CWEB. Writing programs and explaining algorithms to people rather than to computers is actually fun! One can say, it’s very much enlightening.

I wrote a sorting visualizer in high school and years after, decided to re-write it using the principles of Literate Programming. My raw C code became not only much clearer, but also a pleasure to read with its automatic documentation.

-> Go to the literate sorting repository