I re-watched parts of Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor.

I was reminded that creators need to be able to see what they are doing without any mental mapping.

That is why one problem with #literate #programming is the mental burden of double compilation. You can’t run your debugger on the literate source, so you have to first compile it, and then do the mental mapping in the debugger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

YouTube

This mental burden of course exists for regular programs as well. You have to imagine what the source code instructions would do.

A live system, like Smalltalk, is better in this regard. I want to explore more how to incorporate liveness in programming.