I’ve long been fascinated by literate programming (the art of writing code as if it was a novel), but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen a good example of in practice. Here’s a good one:

I wanted to showcase the BDD-inspired low-tech solution I came up with via a toy project, demonstrating a small but significant programming task, broken down as series of design-implementation cycles.

Wordle is a perfect target: it’s a small codebase, with a half dozen features to string together into a useable game.

This story has five chapters and a satisfying conclusion:

This project was my first foray into literate programming at this scale, an attempt to bring together all the good ideas of TDD, modern Python development, Gherkin usage for requirements traceability purposes (without overly zealous extremes of Cucumber automation). All these ideas were until now scattered, implemented each without the others in different places, and this project fuses them into something I hope is more valuable than the sum of its parts.