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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31666 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Here's a very trivial and absolutely unclear case: literate programming.

Consider the style of Jupyter notebook in which one produces a document, intended for human consumption (i.e. full of explanatory markdown cells) but which also has executable code cells.

If you publish the notebook under the belief that people will execute it, then you would not be protected. Intent doesn't really care about how direct or indirect you make the implementation; all that changes is the difficulty of proving it.

There's no bright line here at all. Give the right programmer a bunch of machine code (just hex numbers), and they can read it and tell you what it does. Perhaps laboriously, but the same is true of Ancient Greek.

Literate programming is also executable.

Take any jupyter notebook, click "restart run all" and it re-executes the code cells.

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