I have fun in weird ways.

For ex­am­ple, I may read about a tool and then de­cide to trans­late a clone of the tool from one pro­gram­ming lan­guage to an­oth­er. And then af­ter it works but the code is aw­ful, re­write it, then re­lease it

In a week­end. It helps that the thing is small (un­der 200LOC) but it's still an in­di­ca­tion that I am hav­ing fun do­ing it.

So, what is it? I wrote Cryc­co, a Crys­tal tool sim­i­lar to Doc­co, which is a lit­er­ate pro­gram­ming tool.

A what?

A lit­er­ate pro­gram­ming tool. Mean­ing a tool that lets you:

• Gen­er­ate a pro­gram's code out of a doc­u­ment
• Gen­er­ate a doc­u­ment out of a pro­gram's code
• Gen­er­ate a doc­u­ment and a pro­gram's code out of a "lit­er­ate doc­u­men­t"

That may be do­ing the op­po­site of ex­plain­ing what it ac­tu­al­ly does, so here's an ex­am­ple.

I wrote Cryc­co which if you look at it looks like a nor­mal, al­though very heav­i­ly com­ment­ed crys­tal pro­gram.

But if you pass the source code for Cryc­co through cryc­co it pro­duces the cryc­co web­site ... go take a look!

As you can see it's a de­tailed ex­pla­na­tion of what the pro­gram does and how the code work­s. It's the same thing on­ly pre­sent­ed dif­fer­ent­ly.

It's much eas­i­er to fol­low the ex­pla­na­tions when they run along­side the code rather than in­ter­rupt­ing it, is­n't it?

Let's see another example. Crycco uses a YAML file for some aspects of its configuration. Usually I would just add some comments and tell you to go and read the file.

But that would present you with ... well, YAML and com­ments. Github does an ad­mirable job con­vey­ing that data, but com­pare it with Cryc­co's lan­guages.yml

What do you think is eas­i­er to read and more un­der­stand­able?

So, there it is, and it's pret­ty us­able, even if I still want to ex­tend it in some ways (like... let's gen­er­ate Mark­down! And use that to gen­er­ate a PDF! Like it's 1989 and we are us­ing nuwe­b!)

Yes, lit­er­ate pro­gram­ming has been dead for a cou­ple of decades, but it's far from a worth­less idea. It can be used, it can be used pur­pose­ful­ly and be valu­able, and I have ideas that can be achieved us­ing Cryc­co or a sim­i­lar tool.

Hope it's use­ful for some­one else too.