You may be interested in using Org [1], in conjunction with literate-lisp [2] (for Common Lisp) and literate-elisp [3] (for Emacs Lisp). Org provides various outlining commands (among other things), letting you view your program at different levels of granularity. literate-lisp/elisp advise the Lisp reader so the Org file can be loaded and/or compiled directly, without requiring tangling. Consequently, tools like xref will jump to the source block in your Org file, rather than the tangled source. I wrote a little hack/guide to extend this to errors raised in Emacs' compilation-mode. [4]
(Unfortunately, the package that lets each Org source block behave as though it was using the corresponding language's Emacs major mode - poly-org-mode - has a ton of bugs. It was part of why I stopped using literate programming entirely for later projects.)
I should have mentioned that emacs is also a fundamental tool for all of my work. But since everyone, everywhere uses emacs that would be stating the obvious :-)
I tried orgmode. I even attended a course at CMU that used it for the "live notes". It is excellent for teaching. But it has the same flaw as the "live notebook" idea. There is no generally accepted structure to the approach.
Everyone "understands" books. They have a preface, chapters, an index, a bibliography, pictures, credits, and a table of contents. Literate programs leverage that shared understanding of the structure.
Think of a physics textbook. If you just copy every equation out of the book then you "have the code". All the rest is explanation. They belong together so the explanation and equations (code) are intermingled.
I'm a "primitivist". I work in straight text at an emacs buffer in fundamental mode.
The point of my code is to "talk to the machine". The point of my literate program is to "explain to other programmers (mostly 'future' me)". Note that this is NOT DOCUMENTATION. It is explanation, best presented in book form.
I work with the author of your link [2], and his literate programming documents for Common Lisp are awesome. Watching him during Zoom screen-shares is fun. I am not currently a user of literate-lisp but it is on my non-urgent to-do list.
(Unfortunately, the package that lets each Org source block behave as though it was using the corresponding language's Emacs major mode - poly-org-mode - has a ton of bugs. It was part of why I stopped using literate programming entirely for later projects.)
[1] https://orgmode.org/ [2] https://github.com/jingtaozf/literate-lisp [3] https://github.com/jingtaozf/literate-elisp [4] https://contrapunctus.codeberg.page/blog/literate-programmin...