Noweb is designed to meet the needs of literate programmers while remaining as simple as possible. Its primary advantages are simplicity, extensibility, and language-independence. Noweb uses 5 control sequences to WEB's 27. The noweb manual is only 4 and a bit pages; an additional page explains how to customize its LaTeX output. Noweb works “out of the box” with any programming language, and supports TeX, LaTeX, and HTML back ends. A back end to support full hypertext or indexing takes about 250 lines; a simpler one can be written in 40 lines of awk. Noweb does not prettyprint natively, but supports prettyprinting through such third-party filters as pretzel and dpp.