Donald Knuth is pretty cool. One of the books he wrote that I own and have actually read[*] is Literate Programming, in which he describes (among other things) weaving program text and documentation together in a single narrative.
Two of his books that I own and have sort of dipped into here and there are TeX: the Program, and METAFONT: the Program. These are literate programs, created from webs in which Human text and Computer text are interleaved to tell the story of what the program does.
Human text and computer text, but not images. If you want pictures, you have to carry them around separately. Even though we are highly visual organisms, and many of the programs we produce have significant graphical components, very few programming environments treat images as anything other than external files that can be looked at and maybe previewed. The only programming environment I know of that lets you include images in program source is TempleOS.
I decided to extend the idea of the Literate web to the realm of Figurative Programming. A gloom (graphical loom) web can contain human text, computer text, and image descriptions (e.g. graphviz, plantuml, GLE…) which get included in the human-readable document as figures.
The result is gloom. It’s written in itself, so the easiest way to get started is with the Xcode project at gloomstrap which can extract the proper gloom sources from the gloom web. Alternatively, you can dive in and read the PDF it made about itself.
Because I built gloomstrap first, gloom is really a retelling of that program in a Figurative Programming web, rather than a program that was designed figuratively. Because of that, I don’t really have experience yet of trying to design a system in gloom. My observation was that the class hierarchy I came up with in building gloomstrap didn’t always lend itself to a linear storytelling for inclusion in a web. I expect that were I to have designed it in noweb rather than Xcode, I would have had a different hierarchy or even no classes at all.
Similarly, I didn’t try test-firsting in gloom, and nor did I port the tests that I did write into the web. Instinct tells me that it would be a faff, but I will try it and find out. I think richer expressions of program intention can only be a good thing, and if Figurative Programming is not the way in which that can be done, then at least we will find out something about what to do instead.
[*] Coming up in January’s De Programmatica Ipsum: The Art of _The Art of Computer Programming_, an article about a book that I have _definitely_ read _quite a few bits here and there_ of.
