The goal in writing is to write for the reader. This is hard even under the best circumstances. Rewriting literate programs enjoys the worst aspects of both rewriting prose and rewriting code.

When programming, it’s not uncommon to write a function that’s “good enough for now”, and revise it later. This is impossible to adequately do in literate programming. It happens a lot more with explanations, and you see this in Crafting Interpreters where Nystrom refactors portions of code into new functions. This is impossible to adequately do in Knuth’s WEB (or CWEB) approach.