The CodeChat system for software documentation
Project description
CodeChat transforms source code into a web page, allowing developers to view their program as a beautiful and descriptive document by adding headings, formatting, hyperlinks, diagrams, images, and other forms of rich content to capture the ideas and insights that naturally flow from the process of writing a program. It also provides a blank slate in which to plan ahead, by sketching out an algorithm before committing it to code or laying out a design document which can evolve as the code does. This literate programming paradigm changes the way developers think by intermingling ideas with their implementation as code, dramatically improving a programmer’s abilities.
Installation
See the installation intructions.
Background
Put simply, literate programming (LP) is the realization that a program is a document written to and for fellow programmers, not simply a list of instructions for a computer. LP tools therefore produce a nicely-formatted document which contains the code intermixed with explanatory prose. Donald Knuth introducted literate programming using his WEB tool in his seminal paper. Per Figure 1 of this paper, the WEB system takes a .w document as input then produces either a “tangled” source file for compilation or a “woven” document as a .tex file. The document is beautiful; the WEB source is difficult to digest (see Figure 2a-c); the source code is completely unreadable (see Figure 3). While a plethora of tools developed over the years attempt to address these problems, only one LP-inspired variant has gained widespread acceptance: documentation generators, such as Doxygen and JavaDoc, which extract documentation directly from source code, rather than extracting source code from the documentation, as WEB and most LP tools do. CodeChat addresses these LP weaknesses by producing a doucment directly from the code; employing human-readable markup (reStructuredText); and by supporting a GUI to make editing an LP document-program faster and easier.
Tutorial
The CodeChat tutorial guides new users into exploring CodeChat’s literate programming abilities. Start here! Or, peruse the examples below to see the ways in which CodeChat transforms plain source code into beautiful documents.
Examples
Some examples of literate programming using CodeChat:
Use of a toctree directive to categorize all source files in CodeChat itself
Use of tables to help design a simple parser.
Use of a numbered list to explain a simple state machine.
Use of hyperlinks to provide reference information for all Sphinx configuration values.
Use of fonts to show what setup.py commands to run
Use of a screenshot to demonstrate the operation of a 3-D simulation.
Use of equations and diagrams in scientific computing.
Use of equations to explain the resulting code for an integrator.
CodeChat is used for code examples in a course on microprocessors.
Contributing
This is a fairly basic implementation; much improvement is needed! Please use the issue tracker to report bugs or request features; even better, contribute to the code!
License
Copyright (C) 2012-2016 Bryan A. Jones.
This file is part of CodeChat.
CodeChat is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
CodeChat is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with CodeChat. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
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