Literate programming was invented by Donald Knuth as a technique for improved documentation of program understanding. It involves writing code and documentation in a single source document, ordered for comprehension by humans rather than computers. Despite its ability to produce software of higher quality and maintainability, the technique is not widely used. In this report, we present a comprehensive background of literate programming that shows what the methodology is currently capable of. We also isolate the factors that limit its mainstream use, forming a set of requirements for further work.