re: "Literate Programming" is admission of defeat.
This seems like a misunderstanding of Knuth's purpose in developing Literate Programming. Sure, trivial boilerplate code for a dictionary class should be largely self-documenting. But that's not really what Knuth works on. Think of things like TeX's layout algorithm, or huge combinatorial problems, where knowing exactly what each line of code does gives little insight into the big picture.
This seems like a misunderstanding of Knuth's purpose in developing Literate Programming. Sure, trivial boilerplate code for a dictionary class should be largely self-documenting. But that's not really what Knuth works on. Think of things like TeX's layout algorithm, or huge combinatorial problems, where knowing exactly what each line of code does gives little insight into the big picture.