Well, the "80 lines" was supposed to be a joke, guess it failed... Anyway:
> And with some care and taste, that code can actually be as good as
That's true. Also because modern languages are more flexible than the ones in the 80s - probably, I wasn't around back then, but I remember from learning C that there was "old style" where all variables had to be declared at the beginning of the function, and that "new style" (second half of 90s?) was to declare them at the point of use. My guess would be that this and other similar limitations were the reason for writing CWEB. The order and flow of the presentation is very important to Knuth, so he wrote a tool which allowed him the freedom of putting text and code in the way he wanted.
Modern languages are in general flexible enough to make this a non-issue, as the presentation can be safely included in the source, and you have much freedom in structuring (ordering) the code, too. CoffeeScript is one example of "literate programming in the modern world".
That being said, I think you greatly underestimate how much care is needed to write code like this. I'd guess that not many professional programmers could do this - it's that hard. But yeah, beautiful when executed well.
> And with some care and taste, that code can actually be as good as
That's true. Also because modern languages are more flexible than the ones in the 80s - probably, I wasn't around back then, but I remember from learning C that there was "old style" where all variables had to be declared at the beginning of the function, and that "new style" (second half of 90s?) was to declare them at the point of use. My guess would be that this and other similar limitations were the reason for writing CWEB. The order and flow of the presentation is very important to Knuth, so he wrote a tool which allowed him the freedom of putting text and code in the way he wanted.
Modern languages are in general flexible enough to make this a non-issue, as the presentation can be safely included in the source, and you have much freedom in structuring (ordering) the code, too. CoffeeScript is one example of "literate programming in the modern world".
That being said, I think you greatly underestimate how much care is needed to write code like this. I'd guess that not many professional programmers could do this - it's that hard. But yeah, beautiful when executed well.