The act of authorship is an act of taking fluid human thoughts and structuring theminto linear arguments or narratives

It can be amusing to see authors taking pains to describe recommended paths through theirbooks, sometimes with the help of sophisticated traversal charts — as if readers ever paidany attention, and were not smart enough to map their own course. An author is permitted,however, to say in what spirit he has scheduled the different chapters, and what path hehad in mind for what Umberto Eco calls the Model Reader — not to be confused with thereal reader, also known as “you”, made of flesh, blood and tastes.The answer here is the simplest possible one. This book tells a story, and assumesthat the Model Reader will follow that story from beginning to end, being however invitedto avoid the more specialized sections marked as “skippable on first reading” and, if notmathematically inclined, to ignore a few mathematical developments also labeledexplicitly.

in literate programming, the problem and its should be described in the manner best suited to the problem and the intended readership. That means non-linear, in a compiler's sense. Fragments of procedures presented out of order, procedures presented in any order, data structures introduced in any order. Perhaps objects give us a handle on the non-linearization, because they can be created in any order, and methods are very short. Webbed descriptions could also be fine, but of course people do read one sentence at a time, and when you convert to paper there is an order to the paper. But that order should be ordered to the reader, not the compiler (until it is time to compile)!

The linear structure of a notebook that forces the narrative to follow the order of the computation.

there is an intended reading order

Literate programs allow you to answer these questions naturally.

It’s more productive to work with fewer but larger documents that bundle many bits and pieces together. If I send you a link to a section called out in the TOC, it’s as if I sent you a link to an individual document. But you land in a context that enables you to find related stuff by scanning the TOC.