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LISPs seem to me the best candidates for an alternative to the traditional text editor. I could imagine a mind-map sort of view which would allow you to expand
by kristiandupont 8y ago
LISPs seem to me the best candidates for an alternative to the traditional text editor. I could imagine a mind-map sort of view which would allow you to expand and collapse sub-trees etc. Does anything like this exist? To me, that would be reason to experiment with something like Clojure.
- cnasc 8y agoYou might find this repo interesting: https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens
- gumby 8y agoThere is a long history (going back to the 1970s) of structure editors for Lisp and there was a discussion of them on HN recently. Interlisp and Interlisp-D were the primary proponents of this approach; I used to use D-Edit when I worked in Interlisp at PARC, though it wasn't really for me as it heavily depended on the mouse. IMHO structure editing emphasizes the wrong part of code development. In practice collapsing graph structure is less important in code as opposed to, say, JSON. Whereas you want to be able to use your eye to hop around, and free-form alignment sometimes helps to show parallel constructs. Remember also that in a structure editor even your comments have to be part of the code and can only be inserted in places where an expression won't change the flow of control (e.g. you can't do (if (* this is a comment*) some-condition result))