The late Jef Raskin was apparently doing what I call "lightweight literate programming" in 1984 or earlier. An interview with Raskin appears in the 1989 book Programmers at Work [Lammers], with a frontispiece that shows a two-page document containing BASIC code; the heading of that document contains the date 1984. The caption on the frontispiece is "This program demonstrates how Raskin embeds executable code into text that is produced by a word processor." The technique that Raskin was using seems to be identical to the technique that we are proposing in these pages. The frontispiece was presented only as an interesting aside, however; in the interview that follows, neither Raskin nor the interviewer mentions the program or the programming technique at all.

Raskin referred to that example in a 2005 opinion piece in ACM's Queue [Raskin], in which he said "Ideally, comment should be the default, with a way to signal the occasional lines of code." He called Knuth's original paper on literate programming "must reading" and continued "I do not think that we need all of his mechanism, but the essential concept of writing the documentation first, creating the methods in natural language, and describing the thinking behind them is a key to high-quality commercial programming."

Unfortunately, Raskin never made any other serious effort to promote these ideas, as far as I have been able to discover, and he died in the same month that the Queue article appeared.