Lecture 3: Literate Programming

Author

Brian J. Smith

Published

January 22, 2026

Literate Programming

In class, I live-coded in Quarto to demonstrate Literate Programming. The homepage.qmd document and the lecture recording are available on Canvas.

Resources

Here are some useful resources that I referred to during the lecture or would like to make you aware of now.

Quarto Website
Quarto Cheatsheet
Quarto HTML Basics (for a bunch of good ideas!)
Quarto HTML Format Options
TinyTeX (if you want to render to PDF)
Markdown Wikipedia Page (in case you’re interested in the history)
LaTeX Wikipedia Page (in case you’re interested in the history)
Quarto LaTeX Equations (in case you want math in your document; see below)
MathJax Quick Reference (for help writing equations)

Math

I forgot to mention this during the lecture, but easily including Greek letters, math symbols, or equations is also very easy in a Quarto document. By default, HTML pages render the math using MathJax.

Inline

You can include equations, like $y = mx + b$, inline in your documents. You create an inline equation by wrapping the expression in $.

Chunks

You can also write math in chunks on their own line(s). You begin a chunk with $$, write the chunk, and end it with $$.

\[ \mu = \beta_0 + \beta_1 x \] \[ y \sim Normal(\mu, \sigma^2 ) \]