Donald Knuth on the central idea of Literate Programming:
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
This is the second paragraph of the introduction in Knuth’s literate programming article: (Knuth 1984).
Knuth, Donald Ervin. 1984. “Literate Programming.” The
Computer Journal 27 (2): 97–111. http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf.