In a new post to his blog Henri Berguis takes a look at something that seems to be popping up more and more these days - literate programming. He's created a simple tool that can help implement this in your development too called noweb (modeled after the noweb python project).

The literate programming paradigm, as conceived by Knuth, represents a move away from writing programs in the manner and order imposed by the computer, and instead enables programmers to develop programs in the order demanded by the logic and flow of their thoughts.

Literate programming allows the developer to set up one file, one with more natural language, and have the tool split it up into two other files - one for execution and the other used as documentation. He steps you through how the noweb tool works to pull in the file, parsing out the information via regular expressions (based on the noweb-style) and pushing the two versions of the file back out on the other side. The documentation is set up to end up as HTML and the code will be the literal code pulled from the noweb document itself.

The latest episode of the Zend Developer Zone podcast, PHP Abstract, has been posted today - an interview with Zak Greant:

Today I'm going to talk to Zak Greant. Zak's web page tells us: Zak Greant's love of Free Software and Open Source is turning him into a penguin. When not practicing how to waddle or wear a tuxedo, he passes the time running the Foo Associates strategic consultancy and by working with various Free Software and Open Source projects and companies.

There's three ways to grab this episode - the mp3, the in-page player and, of course, the feed you can drop in your aggregator of choice to keep up to date.