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Interesting. I've been thinking about an alternate way of structuring programming tools that's along these lines. I've written about it here: http://westoncb.bl

Interesting. I've been thinking about an alternate way of structuring programming tools that's along these lines. I've written about it here: http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-to-make-view-independent-program.html http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-to-make-view-indepe...

chriswarbo 11y ago
Very interesting, especially tracing a path through the grammar; I saw "path" and was expecting something more unwieldy like an infinite trie of all valid programs. Whilst I agree that the visual and on-disk representations of programs are too tightly-coupled, there are many structure-based IDE experiments out there, but few see much adoption due to the immense momentum of existing infrastructure, and the subtlety of integrating nicely with things like version control. It's a less drastic change to make existing language compilers/interpreters more modular, so that we can use them for things like parsing, type-checking, optimisation, etc. in a "standalone" way, without having to reinvent everything from scratch each time we want to do something the implementors didn't consider.
- westoncb 11y ago
  Hey Chris, thanks for checking it out. The way I see it, the fact that our programming tools operate on huge character sequences is historical accident. Rather than coming up with a particular editor, I'm trying to think of what a more 'correct' structure for representing programs in general would be, as a replacement for character sequences. Of course this is essentially suggesting a paradigm shift, and as you say (approximately), the current paradigm has lots of momentum. It feels like this might be closer to describing planetary orbits with the more natural ellipses rather than circles—but maybe I'm just suggesting triangles or something :)
- westoncb 11y ago
  Also, probably the most subtle thing I do in there is change what it is that the grammar is actually describing, so that the 'grammar' I talk about paths through is actually talking about higher level things than grammars ordinarily are.

chriswarbo 11y ago

Very interesting, especially tracing a path through the grammar; I saw "path" and was expecting something more unwieldy like an infinite trie of all valid programs. Whilst I agree that the visual and on-disk representations of programs are too tightly-coupled, there are many structure-based IDE experiments out there, but few see much adoption due to the immense momentum of existing infrastructure, and the subtlety of integrating nicely with things like version control. It's a less drastic change to make existing language compilers/interpreters more modular, so that we can use them for things like parsing, type-checking, optimisation, etc. in a "standalone" way, without having to reinvent everything from scratch each time we want to do something the implementors didn't consider.

westoncb 11y ago
Hey Chris, thanks for checking it out. The way I see it, the fact that our programming tools operate on huge character sequences is historical accident. Rather than coming up with a particular editor, I'm trying to think of what a more 'correct' structure for representing programs in general would be, as a replacement for character sequences. Of course this is essentially suggesting a paradigm shift, and as you say (approximately), the current paradigm has lots of momentum. It feels like this might be closer to describing planetary orbits with the more natural ellipses rather than circles—but maybe I'm just suggesting triangles or something :)
westoncb 11y ago
Also, probably the most subtle thing I do in there is change what it is that the grammar is actually describing, so that the 'grammar' I talk about paths through is actually talking about higher level things than grammars ordinarily are.