Literate programming is an approach to programming introduced by Donald Knuth as an alternative to the structured programming paradigm of the 1970s. The literate programming paradigm, as conceived by Knuth, represents a move away from writing programs in the manner and order imposed by the computer, and instead enables programmers to develop programs in the order demanded by the logic and flow of their thoughts. Literate programs are written as an uninterrupted exposition of logic in an ordinary human language, much like the text of an essay, in which macros which hide abstractions and traditional source code are included.

Literate programming tools are used to both en-tangle a literate program into a form suitable for further compilation or execution, and to weave the program into formatted documentation. While the first generation of literate programming tools were computer language-specific, the later ones are language-agnostic and exist above the programming languages. A literate program is an explanation of the program logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code.

Macros in a literate source file are simply title-like or explanatory phrases in a human language that describe human abstractions created while solving the programming problem, and hiding chunks of code or lower-level macros. These macros are similar to the algorithms in pseudocode typically used in teaching computer science. These arbitrary explanatory phrases become precise new operators, created on the fly by the programmer, forming a meta-language on top of the underlying programming language.

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