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Ask HN: Show Code with Notes Alongside

3 points by glaucon ↗ HN
Tell me about projects that allow code to be displayed on the left and notes about that code to be displayed on the right ?

I've seen this in the past but I can't find an implementation now.

Thanks.

EDIT: I should have said that the 'code on the left, notes on right thing' was overly prescriptive, as long as the notes and code are in columns and the notes sit alongside the relevant part of the code that's good as far as I'm concerned.

5 comments

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turtleyacht
Bret Victor's ideas about interaction computing from a development perspective:

http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming

glaucon
This is great thanks, only had time to skim it so far but these are very much the type of ideas I was trying to pursue ... albeit probably not as richly as shown here. Thanks.
blondin
i have seen those in annotated javascript documentation. but it was the other way around. (comment on the left, and code on the right). they all seem to use docco[0] with the option to display comment in "parallel". the author of docco used it in their library underscore[1].

[0]: https://github.com/jashkenas/docco

[1]: https://underscorejs.org/docs/underscore-esm.html

glaucon
This is spot on, thanks. In fact I'm reasonably sure that it was 'docco' I was remembering having seen in the past.

While digging around with your references I came across Pycco [1] which is a python optimized version of docco and as it's Python I'm trying to document that's a very useful thing to find. Thanks.

[1] https://pycco-docs.github.io/pycco/

abudabi123
The Dr Racket IDE has a Literate Programming feature. I guess you can give it a display template to relate code to commentary on a landscape orientation. There is the ancient CWEB tooling. The Emacs editor has code/comment jumping superpowers and you can have the display buffers oriented side-by-side C-x 3.