Word.ws English Dictionary

literate programming

literate programming noun: a programming paradigm in which a program is given as an explanation of the program logic in a natural language (such as English), interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable representation can be generated.

Noun

literate programming (uncountable)

  1. A programming paradigm in which a program is given as an explanation of the program logic in a natural language (such as English), interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable representation can be generated.

Origin of literate programming

Coined by Donald Knuth in 1984.

Questions about literate programming

What does literate programming mean?
Literate programming means a programming paradigm in which a program is given as an explanation of the program logic in a natural language (such as English), interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable representation can be generated.
What part of speech is literate programming?
Literate programming is a noun.

Words near literate programming in the dictionary

  1. literaryism
  2. literaryisms
  3. literata
  4. literatae
  5. literate
  6. literate programming
  7. literately
  8. literateness
  9. literates
  10. literatesque
  11. literatesqueness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: literate programming (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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