Interesting to see this come up. I've been migrating a couple projects to babel, the emacs org-mode literate programming style. Starting with the hello-world of babel, my emacs config file.

Babel and Org have clunky syntax but the mode takes care of that. The combination isn't perfect but it's very powerful, in particular the ability to chain several languages together in flexible ways.

Coming up with more ways to combine pretty formatting with syntax highlighting is polishing a pretty smooth surface. I'm dreaming of a really slick syntax and operating environment, like babel if it wasn't tacked onto org. In the meantime, using what we have.