Etymology

literate programming

Today it means: A programming paradigm in which a program is given as an explanation of the program logic in a natural language (such as English), interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable representation can be generated. Full definition →

Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

The story

Coined by Donald Knuth in 1984.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.