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About your editor rant, I am not sure I agree with you. A great editor will help you for sure in productivity. However, a language shouldn't be unreadable witho
by d0m 16y ago
About your editor rant, I am not sure I agree with you. A great editor will help you for sure in productivity. However, a language shouldn't be unreadable without a correct editor.
Imagine that, to read English, you actually needed a powerful editor.. Yes, some tools help you to be more productive (such as searching, replacing, etc.).
So, again in my opinion, a good test to see if a language is readable is to print it and read it without any special tools such as syntax highlighting. If you can actually do that, imagine how syntax highlighting will make you even more productive!
By the way, it may sound absurd, but try reading English or Python without colors..
- noahlt 16y agoI think it's interesting that in the language features vs editor features debate, Lispers tend to be on the "language features" side, while Java programmers usually favor powerful IDEs/editors. In this particular discussion, the sides are oddly flipped!
- eru 16y agoThe editor helps you write Lisp, by keeping count of parens, but once it's written, it should be readable without any special support. And reading Python without colours isn't much fun. Haskell can get away without colours in Papers, but the authors tend to substitute lots of mathematical symbols there with the help of TeX. (And they use other typographical hints instead of colour.)
- phaylon 16y agoI've always been wondering if people who can't stand using parenthesis highlighting are also opposed to using an IDE when writing Java.