I love this comment, and probably wouldn't even disagree with "It's basically horrible" :), but just to point out a few things:
- "The generated result won't even have proper indentation." Actually, what you see in the typeset output generated by weave/cweave is what Knuth considers proper indentation, and he has written paeans multiple times to Myrtle Kellington (executive editor for ACM publications) who developed that style, etc. There are a lot of lines in WEAVE devoted to getting the indentation exactly so. I personally find it hard to read as well (as I imagine do most programmers), and both McIlroy in his review ("Second, small assignment statements are grouped several to the line with no particularly clear rationale. This convention saves space; but the groupings impose a false and distracting phrasing...") and Harold Thimbleby in his Cweb article mention these departures from what C (etc) programmers are used to.
- "Web and CWeb are programs geared toward someone who is an academic, mainly interested in writing a paper that revolves around a small amount of code." I would disagree: yes they are geared towards someone who is an academic -- specifically Knuth -- but from everything he's said, his love of LP is about the programs themselves, not papers about them. (Look at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html for some of his programs; he says he writes several programs a week and keeps most of them to himself; the ones published online before Sep 2017 I had typeset here: https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate-programs -- I ought to clean up and refresh that stuff.)
- Finally, WEB arose out of certain specific constraints. After he had written the original version of TeX in SAIL for his personal use, it turned out there was widespread demand for it, and people at other places had started porting it into their local systems/languages (with risk of incompatible/irreproducible implementations). For this he decided to embark on a two-year rewrite into the language that was available at the most number of university computer systems: Pascal. This language had been designed primarily for teaching, and at this time there wasn't even a Pascal standard by that name -- every compiler did its own thing. So he was targeting the "common denominator" of Pascal compilers, which meant no separate compilation units to be linked in; everything had to be in a single file at least as seen by the compiler. (In fact his TeX78 in SAIL had been written as several separate files in a more conventional (to us) style.) And yeah, the fact that he had been requested to eventually publish the source code of TeX (which he did, Volume B of Computers and Typesetting) played a part.
BTW the author/maintainer of Axiom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system...) has been writing it for years in a literate programming style, and whether that is insane/suicidal is beyond my ability to judge at the present. :-)