// the find
jashkenas/docco
Literate Programming can be Quick and Dirty.
Docco is a documentation generator that turns annotated source files into side-by-side HTML pages — comments on the left, code on the right. It's Jeremy Ashkenas's original literate-programming tool, written for CoffeeScript projects but extended to 30+ languages. Small projects that want readable source docs without a full doc system will find it useful.
The concept is genuinely elegant: one command turns your commented source into a navigable, readable website with zero configuration. The parallel layout works well for heavily commented utility code. Supporting a custom languages.json means you can add obscure file types without patching the tool. The codebase is famously self-documenting — docco.litcoffee is itself a literate CoffeeScript file processed by docco.
The project is effectively in maintenance mode — a CoffeeScript tool from 2011 that the ecosystem has largely moved past. It ships no source maps, no watch mode, and no incremental builds, so large codebases get slow full rebuilds. The literate programming model breaks down fast when your code isn't heavily commented: sparse files produce ugly output with wide empty columns. It also has no way to cross-link between files or generate an index, so navigation between source pages is your problem.