Lentic is an Emacs mode which supports multiple views over the same text. This can be used for a form of literate programming. It has specific support for Clojure which it can combine with either LaTeX, Asciidoc or Org-Mode.

With a previous release of lentic (n.d.a) I got a couple of suggestions. One of which was a complaint that it was hard to get going, because lentic lacks documentation. This is a bit unfortunate. Lentic actually did have documentation but it is hidden away as comments in source code; although, it’s not specific to it, I wanted lentic to enable literate programming and it uses itself to document itself.

As on a previous, happier, occasion, I ask for my readers indulgence for this personal post. This was my reading delivered today, 29th January, 2015.

Like many developers I often edit both code and documentation describing that code. There are many systems for doing this; these can be split into code-centric systems like Javadoc which allow commenting of code, or document-centric systems like Markdown which allow interspersing code in documentation. Both of these have the fundamental problem that by focusing on one task, they offer a poor environment for the other.

Since the early development of Tawny-OWL and easy to use syntax has been a specific objective (n.d.) as well as hiding some of the complexity of the OWL API. The intension has always been for Tawny-OWL to be an ontology developer tool first and a programmatic library second and keeping this in mind has been part of the reason that I believe does fill these objectives.