My point is just that in any modern language at a reasonable level of granularity, the order in which you write the code is 99% independent from the order in which you execute it.
To port tangle/weave for a modern language would be to cargo cult a feature that can't possibly help matters, in my opinion.
That said, I'd love to see an example (in a modern language) where a woven bit of literate code was more readable than the well-factored equivalent.
I believe that in most dialects of lisp, macros must be defined before they can be called. [citation needed]
This is not to undermine your point, which I think is valid. Macros would just be an interesting exception because they're arguably the feature of lisp, and surely make up > 1% usage for that family of programming languages.
- Common Lisp the Language, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/html/c...
To me, this paragraph says "using a macro before it's defined is undefined behavior," and seems to back up your assertion.
The functions f, g and h use private variables x and y.
(define f #f)
(define g #f)
(define h #f)
(let ((x #f) (y #f))
(set! f <<Lambda term for f>>)
(set! g <<Lambda term for g>>)
(set! h <<Lambda term for h>>))
<<Lambda term for f>>=
(lambda (p q)
(21 lines of code))
<<Lambda term for g>>=
(20 lines of code)