I wonder if the weaving in literate code is one of the things that could only have been invented to deal with Pascal. It is useful to be able to rearrange the presentation even in JavaScript, but I doubt it would be enough of a pain point for people to invent weaving in an alternate history were literate programming was born on more flexible languages.
I wrote a literate-programming compiler to deal with JavaScript programming (any language works, but js is the one I use the most); it use markdown as the language in which the code is embedded.
For me, prototype setup and async stuff seemed to naturally lead me to want to differ in the ordering between how I write and how the program is laid out. I find it quite liberating to not care what order I write the code in, dashing off a substitution section to deal with later.
I know functions can be used to chunk out code in different orders, but I like the interplay of having it ordered in the writing in a sensible fashion while still getting the compiled view of it in the programmatic ordering.
Plus my version allows for a lot of finely tuned hacking on the language. That is, one can reduce a lot of boiler-plate setup with processing small chunks of code.
Having said all that, I would not use Knuth's original version for js. I think what was particularly attractive was a simple language like markdown for embedding code in a natural and simple way.
The weaving steps seems especially useful for web programming, because of the different languages. For the narrative, you could show HTML, Javascript, CSS, and Python backend code mixed together. The weaving puts them all into separate files for execution.
Thanks for the experience report! I'll check out your repos.
To be honest, I was mostly thinking of Haskell when I wrote my comment. (Semi-) Literate programming is quite popular in their world, and Haskell gives you great flexibility out of the box to order your code. (And even there, having a more flexible order can help, but it's not as urgent.)
qznc makes a great argument for weaving different languages.
