Literate programming is an approach to programming introduced by Donald Knuth as an alternative to the structured programming paradigm of the 1970s.
The literate programming paradigm, as conceived by Knuth, represents a move away from writing programs in the manner and order imposed by the computer, and instead enables programmers to develop programs in the order demanded by the logic and flow of their thoughts. Literate programs are written as an uninterrupted exposition of logic in an ordinary human language, much like the text of an essay, in which macros are included to hide abstractions and traditional source code.
Literate programming tools are used to obtain two representations from a literate source file: one suitable for further compilation or execution by a computer, the "tangled" code, and another for viewing as formatted documentation, which is said to be "woven" from the literate source. While the first generation of literate programming tools were computer language-specific, the later ones are language-agnostic and exist above the programming languages.
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