Entangled, a Bidirectional System for Sustainable Literate Programming

In order to increase the reliability of scientific discourse, the Open Science movement has proposed stronger emphasis open access publishing, open data, and improved coding practices. Such goals should also be supported by better tooling for publishing research with a strong software component. Literate Programming is a paradigm for creating and publishing about software, where functioning source code is interlaced with literary prose. As such literate programming is ideal for mixing scientific content with its own software implementation. The reason why literate programming has not found widespread adoption by the community is two-fold: lack of proper tooling and general unawareness in the scientific community. Entangled aims to remedy the first problem, with the long term ambition to work on the second. A problem holding back literate programming has always been the perceived lack of maintainability of literate programs. Entangled is a Markdown based system that keeps the literate text synchronized with extracted source code. Because Entangled works both ways, the user can keep using their IDE for linting, debugging or AI outsourcing. This paper explores the Entangled method, how it fits with current landscape of tooling, and ramifications for how software publications could look in the future.