2013 Sci-Tech Awards: Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan

A literate program, Physically Based Rendering, recently became the first book to win an Academy Award for it's technical contributions to the film industry. In the acceptance speech, the writers thanked Knuth for the concept. [VIDEO] The book can be compiled into the production-quality renderer [LINK]

I didn't know that Physically Based Rendering was introduced as a book, and that book is a literate program (as in, you can compile the book and get a physically based renderer as a binary) that was so influential that it received an academy award(!). There's a video of two famous actors announcing them, being professionals they explain exactly what the book is about convincingly despite not having a clue what they are talking about: [VIDEO] In their receiving speech they give a shout out to Donald Knuth for pioneering literate programming.

I can't claim you are wrong. But this is so non-intuitive to me that it hurts. I get why "covered ground" for text books would be easier to do. But many textbooks should be pushing the field, as well. Right? And I fully note that the book I linked to is exceptional. It won a oscar.[1] And was basically required reading at pixar, if I recall. [1] [VIDEO]

One of the problems with literate programming is that everyone who wants to write literate programs seems to want to write their own literate programming system. This was the conclusion of a short-lived (running to 5 issues) column of literate programs in the Communications of the ACM (1987–1990), by Christopher J. Van Wyk: > Unfortunately, no one has yet volunteered to write a program using another’s system for literate programming. A fair conclusion from my mail would be that one must write one’s own system before one can write a literate program, and that makes me wonder how widespread literate programming is or will ever become. This column will continue only if I hear from people who use literate-programming systems that they have not designed themselves. And it did not continue. Since then though, it appears that Noweb (and more recently, org-babel, and somewhere in between the Leo editor) is among the literate-programming systems that have been the most successful at getting others to use them! Separately, something amusing: When Donald Knuth came up with "literate programming" (partly because it had been suggested to him, by Tony Hoare IIRC, that he ought to publish as a book the source of the TeX program he was rewriting, so he was led to solve the problem of exposition) and the idea of programs as literature, he made a joke (or maybe he was half-serious, hard to say): > Perhaps we will even one day find Pulitzer prizes awarded to computer programs. ( [LINK] ) That d

When Knuth came up with the term/idea of "literate programming" and the idea of programs as works of literature, in the paper ( [LINK] ) he joked (I think?) that he hoped that, just as there are Pulitzer prizes for literature, there may one day be Pulitzer prizes awarded to computer programs. Well, reality is even stranger than imagination: no computer program has won a Pulitzer prize, but this computer program won an Oscar! Here's a video of the awards ceremony, where Kristen Bell and Michael B. Jordan introduce the recipients, and at 2:12 Matt Pharr comes up and says "needless to say, when we started writing a book we never expected an Academy Award would be the end result of that effort" and thanks Donald Knuth for literate programming: [VIDEO] Knuth has repeated the joke/remark ( [LINK] ): > “This book has deservedly won an Academy Award. I believe it should also be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.”