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.

The noweb manual is only 3 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.

The primary sacrifice relative to WEB is that code is not prettyprinted.