├── Holon_Programming__A_Survey.pdf
└── README.md


/Holon_Programming__A_Survey.pdf:
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https://raw.githubusercontent.com/holon-scribe/holon-programming/51c0c7b26900a56b2e5c955a2c7ae13469ec53fe/Holon_Programming__A_Survey.pdf


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/README.md:
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 1 | Holon programming was a conceptual paradigm developed in the early 1970's by Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe. 
 2 | Its purpose was to give programmers a way to write "structured programs" using mostly natural language
 3 | descriptions (or even ideograms!) that would be replaced by blocks of executable code via a "synthesizer." 
 4 | This idea inspired Donald Knuth to create [literate programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming).
 5 | Knuth describes de Marneffe's approach as: "a way of taking a complicated program and breaking it into 
 6 | small parts. Then, to understand the complicated whole, what you needed is just to understand the small 
 7 | parts, and to understand the relationship between those parts and their neighbors."
 8 | 
 9 | In 1973, de Marneffe wrote a document describing holon programming and privately circulated it among
10 | computer scientists. This document thereafter became a Borgesian mythical book, existing only in citations
11 | by Knuth. But kind librarians sent the one extant copy across the ocean so that it could be typeset and
12 | finally assume a real form!
13 | 
14 | This repository contains de Marneffe's long-lost *Holon Programming: A Survey*, prefaced by a 1974 letter 
15 | from Knuth to the author. Please send any bugs or suggestions to the email address found in the endnote.
16 | 


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