Abstract

Human beings are good in ideas and abstractions. Developing Software is a process that expands the documentation with details that are close to the machine. Donald Knuth proposed “Literate Programming” in 1984 which changes the traditional approaches to the design and development of programs. Instead of having the main task as instructing a computer what needs to be done, the focus should be on explaining to human beings what the stakeholders want a computer to do. Instead of writing code containing documentation, the literate programmer writes documentation containing code. The “program” then becomes primarily a document written for humans. Writing a literate program is more intricate than writing a program in a chosen programming language. With the computers becoming ubiquitous, the inherent essence of computing is so contagious that every human tends to code and even revel in a sequence of codes that work like a program that runs on a computer. The interplay “Human X Computer” with computing as the basis does impact the mental ability as well as the agility of the human coder or programmer. This paper is an overview of certain such impacts.

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