2013 Sci-Tech Awards: Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan

One of the problems with literate programming is that everyone who wants to write literate programs seems to want to write their own literate programming system. This was the conclusion of a short-lived (running to 5 issues) column of literate programs in the Communications of the ACM (1987–1990), by Christopher J. Van Wyk: > Unfortunately, no one has yet volunteered to write a program using another’s system for literate programming. A fair conclusion from my mail would be that one must write one’s own system before one can write a literate program, and that makes me wonder how widespread literate programming is or will ever become. This column will continue only if I hear from people who use literate-programming systems that they have not designed themselves. And it did not continue. Since then though, it appears that Noweb (and more recently, org-babel, and somewhere in between the Leo editor) is among the literate-programming systems that have been the most successful at getting others to use them! Separately, something amusing: When Donald Knuth came up with "literate programming" (partly because it had been suggested to him, by Tony Hoare IIRC, that he ought to publish as a book the source of the TeX program he was rewriting, so he was led to solve the problem of exposition) and the idea of programs as literature, he made a joke (or maybe he was half-serious, hard to say): > Perhaps we will even one day find Pulitzer prizes awarded to computer programs. ( [link] ) That d

When Knuth came up with the term/idea of "literate programming" and the idea of programs as works of literature, in the paper ( [link] ) he joked (I think?) that he hoped that, just as there are Pulitzer prizes for literature, there may one day be Pulitzer prizes awarded to computer programs. Well, reality is even stranger than imagination: no computer program has won a Pulitzer prize, but this computer program won an Oscar! Here's a video of the awards ceremony, where Kristen Bell and Michael B. Jordan introduce the recipients, and at 2:12 Matt Pharr comes up and says "needless to say, when we started writing a book we never expected an Academy Award would be the end result of that effort" and thanks Donald Knuth for literate programming: [this video] Knuth has repeated the joke/remark ( [link] ): > “This book has deservedly won an Academy Award. I believe it should also be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.”