Post-literate Programming: Linking Discussion and Code in Software Development Teams

Abstract

The literate programming paradigm presents a program interleaved with natural language text explaining the code's rationale and logic. While this is great for program readers, the labor of creating literate programs deters most program authors from providing this text at authoring time. Instead, as we determine through interviews, developers provide their design rationales after the fact, in discussions with collaborators. We propose to capture these discussions and incorporate them into the code. We have prototyped a tool to link online discussion of code directly to the code it discusses. Incorporating these discussions incrementally creates post-literate programs that convey information to future developers.