I believe Knuth published the entire source code for TeX as a book consisting of the output from his CWEB tool. I would love to browse through it...<p>I mean, regardless of whether literate programming is viable for &quot;enterprise software&quot; or whatever, that&#x27;s a wonderfully interesting cultural artifact... Inspiring!<p>Some implementations of Unix were also published as books, as well as the original source code for PGP (as a free speech trump card to defeat cryptography export restrictions).<p>These books, I presume, are archived by the Library of Congress, and will be around for a long time. Maybe one day we&#x27;ll need them. Like if GitHub suddenly explodes and all the world&#x27;s software is lost!<p>How to read and write programs is still something of an open question, as far as I&#x27;m concerned. The effort involved in caring for a &quot;literate&quot; code base, and indeed the literacy required, is probably too much for most projects. I don&#x27;t think that makes it a &quot;bad&quot; model. It seems good to have tools available, and for people to try it out.<p>The Haskell world does a bit of literate programming, and tools like lhs2TeX are quite nice for preparing papers and such. There&#x27;s something very beautiful about carefully written code that makes enough sense to be published as a &quot;literate&quot; paper.