LP has been mentioned a number of times on LtU but never featured as a topic of discussion in its own right. On the face of it, it seems like an eminently sensible way to program. Why hasn't it taken the whole world by storm? Knuth puts forward Jon Bentley's observation as one possible answer: "a small percentage of the world's population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently [Knuth is] asking everybody to be in both subsets."

To discuss this and other theories on their merits, a quick refresher on the basics of LP is in order. As usual, the relevant Wikipedia article is informative but bland. As Knuth pointed out, original sources are often best. Here are two good ones:

The second paper is the more interesting of the two. It contains a literate program by Knuth and a review of the same by McIlroy:

Knuth has shown us here how to program intelligibly, but not wisely. I buy the discipline. I do not buy the result. He has fashioned a sort of industrial-strength FabergÃ© egg -- intricate, wonderfully worked, refined beyond all ordinary desires, a museum piece from the start.

I, too, buy the discipline for programming in the small but can't really see how CWEB-like systems can be adapted to and adopted by multi-hacker teams working on very large code bases written in a mixture of different languages. Ramsey's Literate Programming on a Team Project enumerates some of the problems.

Can LP be used for anything other than small-to-medium programs written by a single person in a single language?