15 ms·

IDE WTF

173 points by omaranto 16y ago

sofuture 16y ago
Visual Studio with Resharper does half of the things mentioned in the article. Some of .Net, LINQ for example, was built with the IDE in mind hence LINQ's 'backward' seeming query syntax (you say what you're querying over up front, so the IDE can provide typed autocomplete/information). Even with VS and Resharper, there's still so much that could be done. It's a massive problem though, I think.
- seldo 16y ago
  Visual Studio with Resharper does half of the things mentioned in the article. The key word there is half.
  - sofuture 16y ago
    Sure, but when you do 'half' of the things in a rainbows-and-unicorns utopian feature set, that's worth mentioning :)
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      Actually what do Resharper + VS miss? There was nothing in that list that stuck out to me as something I couldn't do right now.
- rayvega 16y ago
  Agreed. With ReSharper, I don't recall a time where syntax was incorrect at compile time. It immediately indicates any syntax errors at coding time. However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is something I have also wanted. The two closest features are: 1) Visual Studio has a 'Code Definition Window' (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%...) that dynamically displays the contents of a method in a separate window pane. Although it is not inline, at least you can visually see the code without navigating away from the current source file. 2) In ReSharper, you can sort of fake it by calling the command 'Inline Method' and unchecking 'Inline all usages' and then Undo when done inspecting the code. However, that is a hack with its share of problems. I'd prefer a feature to toggle the inline method content in a preview mode without actually modifying any existing code.
  - vilya 16y ago
    > However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is something I have also wanted. Eclipse actually does this. If you hover your mouse over a function name, it will pop up a tooltip showing you the code for the function. I find it extremely handy - it's one of the things I think I'm really going to miss, having just given up on Eclipse because of its frustratingly bad performance.
twymer 16y ago
"click a little [+] next to predict(p) and see it right there inline, with its argument replaced by p? Oh, that’s how that works, cool, [-]." While I like this idea, I fail to see how having to use my mouse to navigate to and click the +/- would be more useful than using a keyboard shortcut to jump to definition..
- crc32 16y ago
  I also think I would find this "inlining" quite confusing in an OOP language, where the "predict" method was a member of an object instance, containing code that referenced this/self.
- AlisdairO 16y ago
  I would love this feature, because I regularly have to deal with OOP code that is constructed solely of functions that are about three lines long. This often swaps method-level complexity for systemic complexity, and it drives me nuts. Having to look back through ten different files to find out how a method does what it does as well as what it does (i.e beyond what you find in your average comment) is infuriating. Being able to inline method definitions would be really helpful, if it could be done in a way that didn't cause breakages around 'this', and so on.
- nailer 16y ago
  I'm sure his proposal didn't preclude keyboard shortcuts.
- wtallis 16y ago
  The point is locality: if you jump to the definition, then the site of the call is no longer on screen. Being able to easily bring up the definition or at least the prototype and a one-line description without losing the current context would be quite useful.
charlief 16y ago
I think it is a case of apples and oranges here. Yes we need to make progress on IDEs, and of course we can borrow inspiration from many sources. I've used every application the author has mentioned: Photoshop, Premiere, Maya, AutoCAD, ProTools, Finale, Reason, PageMaker, and the reasons the tools succeed have more to do with the necessities dictated by the media you are editing rather than some kind of profound innovation.
agscala 16y ago
The author really is understating the power of things we already have, Visual Studio and Emacs in particular (and I suppose he would clump Vim in as well). While they aren't the holy grail of syntax checkers, they are still extremely well tuned tools for creating software.
- jlongster 16y ago
  Agreed. I'll throw in my vote for Emacs; you can get very far with autocompletion (M-/) and tags. Autocompletion will complete the word you are typing with other words from all your open buffers, and it works 95% of the time. Tags allow you to jump to definitions easily. The way Emacs implements these are so dumb but in reality they work great, and it's all really fast. The problem with large IDEs is they can be really slow if they are having to constantly analyze large codebases.
lee 16y ago
It seems like the author forgets that the medium of code IS text. Not graphics, or sound, or a 3D model... but code is text, and for now text is the most concise representation of code. But actually, a textual representation means that you need to rely less on fancy GUI's to write code. There are also added benefits like ease of search. If you're using a nice editor like Emacs or Vim, the medium is very easy to manipulate.
- corruption 16y ago
  Even though code is text, you would think someone would have tried to build a different view given the popularity of MVC. Inline expansion would be nice. So would code paths. So would inline images & html rendering for documentation. So would the relevant rendered html for the issue relating to the code you are looking at. So would other annotations. And what about visually hiding code when working in a language like java? I tried to get this going in eclipse once, and it really wasn't going to happen easily so I gave up. I've always hoped someone would build something similar as I feel it would really help productivity having everything relevant right there with the code. Note: The project http://code.google.com/p/lambda4jdt/ http://code.google.com/p/lambda4jdt/ is the closest thing I have found to what I am suggesting which I think shows the power. It just goes to show that it could work.
  - bruceboughton 16y ago
    Indeed, MS are trying to encourage this with the new WPF-based editor in VS2010. The developer's examples are all about graphical overlays replacing certain types of code. It will be interesting to see if ISVs take this forward.
  - vilya 16y ago
    Jonathan Edwards' Subtext programming language might be of interest to you: http://www.subtextual.org/ http://www.subtextual.org/
  - ollysb 16y ago
    regarding lambda4jdt: It's a sorry state of affairs when you're relying on the IDE to hide the noise in a language.
st3fan 16y ago
"At least I’ve heard IntelliJ IDEA is great, I’ve never used it." & "How come I can still have syntax errors?" Well, I think you answered your own question dude.
alextgordon 16y ago
There is certainly room for IDEs to improve. But there's no way we can ever have the level of automation and abstraction that photographers, video editors and other creatives enjoy. Take the photo clone tool mentioned. Why does that work? Because human vision is lossy and forgiving - the difference between 95% correct and 100% correct is around 5%, depending on how closely the person is looking at it. Programming on the other hand... code is either 0% correct or 100% correct. Anything less than 100% correct is broken. Media is also far less complex. How do I know if my video is correct? I simply play it. If there any errors, they are all possible to detect in the minutes it takes to play the video. There will never be an equivalent for code. You can't visualize an arbitrary algorithm over all its inputs - that's undecidable. It's hard enough to see what a function in three variables does, let alone quicksort. The best we can do is have editors for specific tasks. GUI editors, markup editors, etc. For everything else, code is the only option. We can patch the awkwardness with better languages and better IDEs, but it will never, ever, go away.
- charlief 16y ago
  I agree with most of what you are saying, but never, ever is a long time. If I can be optimistic for a moment, I think 100 years or more from now, successive languages and IDEs won't simply be patches to awkwardness, they will probably help with many real programming problems significantly. Ask yourself how many times have you re-invented something over and over again, or the fragmentation of documentation and usage overhead of frameworks. These are just some. Computer science and software engineering are young disciplines. Comparing different IDEs is often a matter of style and personal choice right now, but if there is ever a big milestone, many will know it and many will adopt it, but until that point I don't think being complacent is the answer. Who knows what black swans lie in the future.
- sofuture 16y ago
  I don't think I really agree with any of that. The binary aspect of software workingness doesn't really matter... Code is just bits of information that gets massaged around, there's no reason why the tools to do so can't improve. Sure the specific example of visualizing an arbitrary algorithm over all inputs might be a little unrealistic, but the point of the post wasn't that we need that specific thing. I'm not denying it's a complex problem (grokking what the code does is hard already, nevermind grokking what it should do), but complex problems aren't fundamentally impossible, they're just... complex!
dtf 16y ago
Some creative apps are dataflow systems. Dataflow maps very well to GUIs and intelligent tools. For the parts which aren't dataflow, you end up with the same manual labour that you have in code editing. Video editing, for instance, is quite similar to code editing. Juggling large libraries of assets, trying to make things fit together on the level of details and taste while maintaining an intelligible and manageable whole and keeping to a deadline. You have tools to help you keep track of things, but you're still mostly on your own.
gosub 16y ago
If I remember correctly, in one of the SICP video lecture, Hal Abelson says that s-exprs are equivalent to the the syntax tree of the program and, given a graphical interface, we would be manipulating this tree directly. AppInventor for Android is the most similar thing we have today, and not surprisingly it's based on Kawa scheme. It would be a very powerful mode of code editing, if it wasn't centered around click and drag operations (and limited to android). I think that a modal editor ala VIM, paired with a graphical code-block environment and fuzzy text autocompletion, would be a nearly perfect IDE.
br1 16y ago
The author overestimates the quality of designer tools.
- torme 16y ago
  Agreed, as an occasional user of After Effects, I can state with certainty that buggy software in media editing definitely exists.
apl 16y ago
I'd rather spend my working life in Emacs than in Photoshop, but I guess just as anything else, UI preferences differ.
msmith 16y ago
I really wonder how much time the author has spent with a modern IDE like Eclipse. For Java development, it really does have all of the features on his wish list, or something equivalent.
- miloshh 16y ago
  Indeed, Eclipse for Java is just unbeatable. I just recently started using it for C++ and it also works surprisingly well. I find myself much more productive than in a text editor, especially in a large code base I didn't know before.
- gb 16y ago
  That was my thought too, Eclipse JDT at least is pretty impressive, some of the other plugins not so much. I was surprised to see IntelliJ mentioned as supposedly good too, I wouldn't say it's terrible, but I find it somewhat lacking in comparison to JDT.
points 16y ago
I don't think it's a good comparison. And the author just comes across as "wah! programming is hard! sob".
primigenus 16y ago
We attempted to solve a lot of these problems in our online HTML/CSS/JS editor/prototyping tool, http://quplo.com http://quplo.com. We also wrote about our frustrations with IDEs earlier this year: http://blog.quplo.com/2010/04/the-modern-ide-sucks/ http://blog.quplo.com/2010/04/the-modern-ide-sucks/ Some things we tried to fix: - The file system; you don't need one when you're building an HTML prototype. Instead you have sheets, where you can organise multiple "files" (URIs, basically) based around how you want to organise, not how some arbitrary hierarchy of nested folders wants you to. - Code completion; intellisense and other completion usually pops up an alphabetic list of everything available in the namespace. In the case of CSS, typing "a" presents you with autocomplete starting with "azimuth". When do you ever need azimuth? So instead, we built "common sense code completion", where the likely most-used properties are surfaced at the top of the list. Now, writing HTML and CSS is mostly a case of pressing tab a lot, and up or down when you don't want the auto-suggested default. - Browser-based; why even write code in a desktop IDE, especially HTML/CSS? Doing in the browser has so many advantages, such as web browsers' awesome tab features or, since it's a web app, everything you write being instantly available online. - Collaboration; as a web app, no more checking in and updating. We handle version management and you just work on your code with your team (long term: Google-style realtime collaboration?) There's a lot to improve about today's IDEs. We got started on one specific for simple HTML development. Someone else should solve this problem for programming languages.
- nailer 16y ago
  If you change your mind and consider doing Python or Ruby as well as HTML, count me in as a customer.
doki_pen 16y ago
I've worked on java projects in both vi and eclipse. While ramp up on larger projects generally takes longer in vi, I feel like the payoff is worth it. What eclipse does for you in suggesting classes become memory muscle pretty quickly in vi. At which point, eclipses slowness is just crippling. If someone could make an IDE that was fast, and could figure out the project completely from my build tool without nudging, I might enjoy it. I just don't see how a more feature rich IDE is going to be faster and less buggy.
- jsvaughan 16y ago
  How do you do refactoring in vi? Do you really search and replace?
  - doki_pen 16y ago
    Yes. It depends on the case, but sed, awk and grep are also useful.
akkartik 16y ago
He's focusing on tool support (for manipulating representations of code), but languages (representations) could do with improvement as well. Or perhaps you could think about both together. How would you coevolve a language with tools? If you could make assumptions about the tools people have, how would that change the language? Ah, that's just smalltalk. Done.
dgallagher 16y ago
Per Apple, Xcode 4 will have a feature that auto-fixes certain coding mistakes, like missing semi-colons: http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html#fix-it http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html...
lelele 16y ago
Why do you complain about IDEs when most popular languages are Java, C, C++, ecc.? (see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....) IDEs can't be better than languages they deal with, because languages shape the way programmers think. Clunky languages call for clunky IDEs.
sedachv 16y ago
Haha, only yesterday I mentioned Interlisp sedit on HN. Welcome to the world of the 1970s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor There's a reason these things weren't all that popular.
- sedachv 16y ago
  Oh boy, and who could forget DWIM. I'm sure if the concept of refactoring existed back then (it didn't; apparently L Peter Deutsch would just throw out your code and start again if he didn't like it) there would be some really cool tools for that too.
  - sedachv 16y ago
    Classic: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o4niyIQ6_O8J:www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/interlisp/Teitelman-FCJJ1972.pdf+programmers+assistant&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShJgKd9Srkt1d1ks_l5JJIQe7Hf4KtT_GVHoHPhmL3MShAYgqrRCr1t1WXoOhg2wa65I7aN244UFvbWAhvJL2IKv0lVTEjSCNGKhWoPVxvniC-gc3go5S7uduKgcMNQrFSGvxYH&sig=AHIEtbT8xcDYio5z9BYceJ7o0c5FXsds4A http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o4niyIQ6_O8J:w... For all the hating, automating programming is an obvious thing to do (the idea is both trivial and quite profound: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645338 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645338), and there are some really cool ideas there (reversible debugging being one).
- acqq 16y ago
  Or the tools that were supposed to "just draw" OO programs, nineties. There's a reason these things nobody uses today.
ghempton 16y ago
It's funny, when I use the programs he mentions, I always wish I had some code to manipulate rather than use some esoteric GUI.
seldo 16y ago
I could not agree more. Given that IDEs are the primary tools of programmers, and unlike Photoshop users our primary skill is to build software itself, why are IDEs not the most advanced pieces of software that exist? It seems logical. They have the most advanced users; they don't need to worry about scaring the kids at home. They should be constantly adopting the latest and greatest in performance and UX. Instead we have vim and emacs which, beloved as they are, still have as their primary interface a grid of characters -- not just the code itself, but the user interface. It's like nothing has changed in terms of the graphical output capabilities of computers since the late 1970s. (And yes, there are WIMP versions, which add drop-down menus. But the primary interface mechanism is still keyboard shortcuts.) Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world, certainly the download takes long enough and there are enough configuration options. Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal that frustrated coders return to vim and emacs so they can get something done. Version control -- a critical function for all modern programmers -- is still largely handled on the command line. Maybe, if you're lucky, you get a side-by-side comparison in Eclipse (but not for git, yet!), but as far as tagging and branching goes, graphical representations are out. WTF? I'm so glad to see this article, because I have spent so long in the company of programmers who hear me ranting about IDEs and just tell me to "use vim", as if that were the problem.
- miloshh 16y ago
  > Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world... Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal... I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...
  - seldo 16y ago
    I used it for years and finally switched away in disgust at the performance. NetBeans is very similar but much faster. (But still terrible, in lots of ways. I've yet to meet an IDE I didn't hate)
shelfu 16y ago
"At least I’ve heard IntelliJ IDEA is great, I’ve never used it." That's like complaining about image manipulation software when all you've used is GIMP. I'm a vim guy from way back, I always avoided big IDEs because of the bloat. IDEA is the first I've tried where the IDE doesn't feel like it's getting in the way, and actually makes the job easier.
- bokchoi 16y ago
  And the IdeaVIM plugin isn't half bad either.
stcredzero 16y ago
but languages are written in text and IDEs are basically text editors with a few extra features. Not necessarily. The text editor features of most Smalltalk IDEs were pretty gimpy, but the text editing was never the exciting part! It's the whole environment being like iPython on steroids everywhere and all the time.
ynniv 16y ago
Adobe has probably made billions of dollars on Photoshop, and has thousands of people working on improving interaction with a regular grid of color values. This is a high profit, low complexity situation. Most developers are not willing to spend $700 on an editor, and the gamut of programming language source code syntaxes is too broad for a single editor to work uniformly across them. But really, comparing anything to Photoshop is silly. Some music sequencing programs will in fact allow you to create measures with the wrong number of beats, and have annoying, unproductive interfaces. Premiere is actually really annoying to work with, which sent a lot of people over to Final Cut. Even extremely similar programs like Adobe Illustrator are fraught with miserable design and crappy storage formats. The OP has valid points, but these apply to most software, and not just IDE's.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  I'd spend $700 on a truly good IDE, and so should any programmer capable of doing simple arithmetic. Calculate how much more productive you can be using the best tools available, then figure out how many hours at your bill rate it will take to make back that investment. For something like IntelliJ ($$$, but awesome) versus Eclipse (free, but crap), most people will find that they break even in less than a week. Assuming you expect your programming career to be longer than that, it's not a tough decision to make.
  - ynniv 16y ago
    A few programmers will pay a lot of money, but most programmers seem to be uninterested in paying more than $70. Compared this to photographers, who will almost universally pay $700. The market is much larger.
    - adbachman 16y ago
      I worked for a large manufacturing / consumer product company as a .NET developer and the four people on my team all had top level MSDN subscriptions. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx ) I think the number I heard for our team, just MSDN subscriptions, was around $25000 a year.
JesseAldridge 16y ago
My first guess was that the programming market was just too small for commercial tools to make a profit. But that doesn't seem to be the case. "Graphic designers held about 286,100 jobs in 2008." http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos090.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos090.htm "Computer software engineers and computer programmers held about 1.3 million jobs in 2008." http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm So now I'm thinking the main problem is that it's hard to compete with open source. There are just so many good-enough open source programming tools out there. Commercial tools not only have to better than the open source stuff, they have to be way better. This is because of all the costs involved with adopting a new IDE: Not just the price of the software, but the time spent learning a new environment and getting it configured right are significant time investments. So open source eats away at the margins of commercial tools, which leads to less people working on commercial tools, which drives more people to the open source incumbents, etc. I believe pg says open source is bad at design. That seems right to me. Open source is good at copying existing tools, but not so good at innovating. So we end up at a local maxima where all programming tools are decent, but not great.
jasonkester 16y ago
Any other VS.NET/ReSharper folks get halfway through his list of things that IDEs don't do, quietly noting that our IDE does in fact do them, then quit reading? That's one of the big benefits of a compiled language like C#. The IDE can be continuously background-compiling, making things like Refactor/Rename work like the author wishes it would instead of replacing strings. Same with Find Usages, Find Declaration, and Automatically Import the Stuff I Need. Every time I wander off into Ruby or Python, I end up coming back a little bit sad. Such nice languages, but the tools just can't hang.
- someone_here 16y ago
  Which brings up a good point: Where are the Javascript IDEs?
  - dagw 16y ago
    JetBrains WebStorm. While not really up to level of some of the better IDEs for other languages, it's probably the best JavaScript IDE currently available.
  - Afton 16y ago
    I've used both vim and Visual Studio. The latter was surprisingly good, providing reasonable code-completion. (disclaimer: I currently work at MSFT, but am not anywhere near the VS team).
  - sireat 16y ago
    This might sound heretical, but I find that current Eclipse 3.6 for Javascript is not bad at all. http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide-javascript-web-developers/heliossr1 http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide-javasc... Since hard drive space is cheap, I have different Eclipse installations for each language I use. This seems to cut down on plugin hell and slowdowns that people often complain about. I can't comment on how good Eclipse is actually for web development, but for embedded Javascript scripting it works splendidly. Most precisely, it lets me zoom in and out of abstractions in a large project with multiple files with ease.
gurraman 16y ago
I'm perfectly happy with the tools I use when programming. The tools I use to manipulate images and photos on the other hand... they're big and clunky, force me to use constipated shortcuts, are tedious to install, cannot be run remotely (well, effectively), they crash and aren't that easy for me to extend. I'm, sort of, working on the opposite problem: I'm tossing a few hours towards a way to manipulate images without the "IDE".
- Tyr42 16y ago
  How about things like ImageMagick?[1] Command line or from a programming language. No IDE at all. I've used it in the past, and it's useful for batch operations. [1]http://www.imagemagick.org/ http://www.imagemagick.org/
dstorrs 16y ago
====QUOTE How come I can still have syntax errors? How come it is ever possible to have a syntax error in a program? Shouldn’t the IDE at least be helping me to have a valid program all the time? Finale doesn’t let you write a measure with the wrong number of beats and then complain when you push play. It just fixes it for you — “oh look, you need a rest there.” ====/QUOTE Oh Luke Palmer, no. NO. The absolute last thing I want from my editor is for it to be modifying the code without my explicit request. Then if something breaks, I need to worry about whether I broke it or whether the editor broke it. (And yes, yes, I know, the compiler "modifies my code", blah blah.)
brudgers 16y ago
Oddly, I have been thinking exactly the opposite - what aspects of IDE's are missing from graphics programs. Among the features of IDE's that programs like AutoCAD and Photoshop lack are continuous error checking and validation. They provide little feedback regarding proper document organization or standards and specifications compliance as part of a typical work flow. In addition, some IDE's offer direct visual feedback regarding user interface design along the same lines (though not necessarily to the same degree) as graphics software. edit: I'm not saying that these features are impossible to implement, rather that implementing them is not feasible for the typical user(victim).
aufreak3 16y ago
My personal IDE wish list below (some simple, some not so, and necessarily incomplete) - 1. Copy-paste abstraction - When you copy a snippet from one part to another, automatically lift it out as a function first. If it can't be abstracted for some reason, alert! 2. Path finder - I have A,B,C and I want to get X,Y,Z. Find me a path through the libraries please. We created Prolog. Can we use it for this? Even guesses are useful. Hoogle is a start (thanks Curry and Howard!). The ABCXYZ can be abstract descriptions like type, or example data. 3. Debugger time travel - move back and forth in time freely, allowing code modification. Me got tons of RAM+disk for history and branching. .. and why can't something get unwritten from a file? 4. Breaking news - when I modify a function that could break something else, tell me now. 5. Link function arguments to in-source example data for testing and exploration. I love to start with data first before writing anything. 6. Embed images and live code snippets as documentation. Ever drew ascii diagrams in source code? Mathematica notebooks have solved this and more already. 7. Function grapher - select an expression and show as graph. At least what "Grapher" on MacOSX provides. The IDE should know basic mathematics - like mathematica. 8. (extension of 7) Design at least simple functions graphically. 9. Spell check myIdentifierNames dammit!
- stevejohnson 16y ago
  Currently working on (4) from the SCM angle. My buddy and I have been lazy bloggers, but we're still coding. http://timunionsteve.posterous.com/ http://timunionsteve.posterous.com/
skoni 16y ago
The Code Bubbles Project is an attempt to rethink the UI of IDEs: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm
fish2000 16y ago
Ah, the grass is always greener. The adobe tools mentioned are excellent for what they do, but they are never without interface quirks that can range from mildly irritating to bizarre -- I have consistently found the Edit Styles box in InDesign to work counterintuitively in small ways, like forgetting that I checked 'preview' or overwriting my edits if a dropdown has been incorrectly fiddled with. Adobe stuff also completely lacks decent version control. "Version Cue" is pretty clunky and has no conception of diff-ing. If I make edits to the story in an InDesign file and replace 3 FPO images with real ones, why can't I have a repository I can browse, in which I can see an awesome and self-explanatory visualization of these changes? Maybe you need InCopy servers for something like that but I don't think that's a feature they have. Contrastingly, with the latest XCode preview, versioning was almost seamless and very nice to work with. After installing the XCode preview, I was able to check out a project from GitHub, run it, edit it, and commit the changes, with a lovely two-pane view of the diff in question when committing, showing additions and deletions. I didn't have to think about it at all -- it was only "almost" seamless as I had to manually do 'git push', which I'm sure they'll fix that in the final release. You can do scripting with JavaScript inside the Adobe apps, but it's slow and the API takes some considerable getting-used-to. Some things most programmers would consider scriptable are not: I'd love to be able to bust out a regex or some conditional logic when building a Photoshop automation, for example; the current interface for that feels condescending and ridiculous if you're coming from TextMate or emacs. Always greener. I'm just sayin.
jeffffff 16y ago
a lot of it has to do with programmers bitching about bad programs way more than users of those other programs. he has obviously never used protools or any audio editing program. protools is one of the best out there, but it is still awful, as are the rest of them. it took digidesign almost a year to add support for leopard and then they charged $150 for the update.
mindcreek 16y ago
just learn to use a good text editor like emacs or vim, I use emacs and it fits me like glow whatever text based activity I am currently engaging at that moment. And yes there can be better IDEs but I wont be using them.
spektom 16y ago
> How come I can still have syntax errors? Google's App Inventor prevents you from making syntax errors, since you use code blocks instead of writing source code. Actually, if you use code templates that any modern IDE has, it helps you to avoid most syntax errors as well...

173 points by omaranto 16y ago

Visual Studio with Resharper does half of the things mentioned in the article. Some of .Net, LINQ for example, was built with the IDE in mind hence LINQ's 'backward' seeming query syntax (you say what you're querying over up front, so the IDE can provide typed autocomplete/information). Even with VS and Resharper, there's still so much that could be done. It's a massive problem though, I think.

seldo 16y ago
Visual Studio with Resharper does half of the things mentioned in the article. The key word there is half.
- sofuture 16y ago
  Sure, but when you do 'half' of the things in a rainbows-and-unicorns utopian feature set, that's worth mentioning :)
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Actually what do Resharper + VS miss? There was nothing in that list that stuck out to me as something I couldn't do right now.
rayvega 16y ago
Agreed. With ReSharper, I don't recall a time where syntax was incorrect at compile time. It immediately indicates any syntax errors at coding time. However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is something I have also wanted. The two closest features are: 1) Visual Studio has a 'Code Definition Window' (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%...) that dynamically displays the contents of a method in a separate window pane. Although it is not inline, at least you can visually see the code without navigating away from the current source file. 2) In ReSharper, you can sort of fake it by calling the command 'Inline Method' and unchecking 'Inline all usages' and then Undo when done inspecting the code. However, that is a hack with its share of problems. I'd prefer a feature to toggle the inline method content in a preview mode without actually modifying any existing code.
- vilya 16y ago
  > However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is something I have also wanted. Eclipse actually does this. If you hover your mouse over a function name, it will pop up a tooltip showing you the code for the function. I find it extremely handy - it's one of the things I think I'm really going to miss, having just given up on Eclipse because of its frustratingly bad performance.

twymer 16y ago

"click a little [+] next to predict(p) and see it right there inline, with its argument replaced by p? Oh, that’s how that works, cool, [-]." While I like this idea, I fail to see how having to use my mouse to navigate to and click the +/- would be more useful than using a keyboard shortcut to jump to definition..

crc32 16y ago
I also think I would find this "inlining" quite confusing in an OOP language, where the "predict" method was a member of an object instance, containing code that referenced this/self.
AlisdairO 16y ago
I would love this feature, because I regularly have to deal with OOP code that is constructed solely of functions that are about three lines long. This often swaps method-level complexity for systemic complexity, and it drives me nuts. Having to look back through ten different files to find out how a method does what it does as well as what it does (i.e beyond what you find in your average comment) is infuriating. Being able to inline method definitions would be really helpful, if it could be done in a way that didn't cause breakages around 'this', and so on.
nailer 16y ago
I'm sure his proposal didn't preclude keyboard shortcuts.
wtallis 16y ago
The point is locality: if you jump to the definition, then the site of the call is no longer on screen. Being able to easily bring up the definition or at least the prototype and a one-line description without losing the current context would be quite useful.

charlief 16y ago

I think it is a case of apples and oranges here. Yes we need to make progress on IDEs, and of course we can borrow inspiration from many sources. I've used every application the author has mentioned: Photoshop, Premiere, Maya, AutoCAD, ProTools, Finale, Reason, PageMaker, and the reasons the tools succeed have more to do with the necessities dictated by the media you are editing rather than some kind of profound innovation.

agscala 16y ago

The author really is understating the power of things we already have, Visual Studio and Emacs in particular (and I suppose he would clump Vim in as well). While they aren't the holy grail of syntax checkers, they are still extremely well tuned tools for creating software.

jlongster 16y ago
Agreed. I'll throw in my vote for Emacs; you can get very far with autocompletion (M-/) and tags. Autocompletion will complete the word you are typing with other words from all your open buffers, and it works 95% of the time. Tags allow you to jump to definitions easily. The way Emacs implements these are so dumb but in reality they work great, and it's all really fast. The problem with large IDEs is they can be really slow if they are having to constantly analyze large codebases.

lee 16y ago

It seems like the author forgets that the medium of code IS text. Not graphics, or sound, or a 3D model... but code is text, and for now text is the most concise representation of code. But actually, a textual representation means that you need to rely less on fancy GUI's to write code. There are also added benefits like ease of search. If you're using a nice editor like Emacs or Vim, the medium is very easy to manipulate.

corruption 16y ago
Even though code is text, you would think someone would have tried to build a different view given the popularity of MVC. Inline expansion would be nice. So would code paths. So would inline images & html rendering for documentation. So would the relevant rendered html for the issue relating to the code you are looking at. So would other annotations. And what about visually hiding code when working in a language like java? I tried to get this going in eclipse once, and it really wasn't going to happen easily so I gave up. I've always hoped someone would build something similar as I feel it would really help productivity having everything relevant right there with the code. Note: The project http://code.google.com/p/lambda4jdt/ http://code.google.com/p/lambda4jdt/ is the closest thing I have found to what I am suggesting which I think shows the power. It just goes to show that it could work.
- bruceboughton 16y ago
  Indeed, MS are trying to encourage this with the new WPF-based editor in VS2010. The developer's examples are all about graphical overlays replacing certain types of code. It will be interesting to see if ISVs take this forward.
- vilya 16y ago
  Jonathan Edwards' Subtext programming language might be of interest to you: http://www.subtextual.org/ http://www.subtextual.org/
- ollysb 16y ago
  regarding lambda4jdt: It's a sorry state of affairs when you're relying on the IDE to hide the noise in a language.

st3fan 16y ago

"At least I’ve heard IntelliJ IDEA is great, I’ve never used it." & "How come I can still have syntax errors?" Well, I think you answered your own question dude.

alextgordon 16y ago

There is certainly room for IDEs to improve. But there's no way we can ever have the level of automation and abstraction that photographers, video editors and other creatives enjoy. Take the photo clone tool mentioned. Why does that work? Because human vision is lossy and forgiving - the difference between 95% correct and 100% correct is around 5%, depending on how closely the person is looking at it. Programming on the other hand... code is either 0% correct or 100% correct. Anything less than 100% correct is broken. Media is also far less complex. How do I know if my video is correct? I simply play it. If there any errors, they are all possible to detect in the minutes it takes to play the video. There will never be an equivalent for code. You can't visualize an arbitrary algorithm over all its inputs - that's undecidable. It's hard enough to see what a function in three variables does, let alone quicksort. The best we can do is have editors for specific tasks. GUI editors, markup editors, etc. For everything else, code is the only option. We can patch the awkwardness with better languages and better IDEs, but it will never, ever, go away.

charlief 16y ago
I agree with most of what you are saying, but never, ever is a long time. If I can be optimistic for a moment, I think 100 years or more from now, successive languages and IDEs won't simply be patches to awkwardness, they will probably help with many real programming problems significantly. Ask yourself how many times have you re-invented something over and over again, or the fragmentation of documentation and usage overhead of frameworks. These are just some. Computer science and software engineering are young disciplines. Comparing different IDEs is often a matter of style and personal choice right now, but if there is ever a big milestone, many will know it and many will adopt it, but until that point I don't think being complacent is the answer. Who knows what black swans lie in the future.
sofuture 16y ago
I don't think I really agree with any of that. The binary aspect of software workingness doesn't really matter... Code is just bits of information that gets massaged around, there's no reason why the tools to do so can't improve. Sure the specific example of visualizing an arbitrary algorithm over all inputs might be a little unrealistic, but the point of the post wasn't that we need that specific thing. I'm not denying it's a complex problem (grokking what the code does is hard already, nevermind grokking what it should do), but complex problems aren't fundamentally impossible, they're just... complex!

dtf 16y ago

Some creative apps are dataflow systems. Dataflow maps very well to GUIs and intelligent tools. For the parts which aren't dataflow, you end up with the same manual labour that you have in code editing. Video editing, for instance, is quite similar to code editing. Juggling large libraries of assets, trying to make things fit together on the level of details and taste while maintaining an intelligible and manageable whole and keeping to a deadline. You have tools to help you keep track of things, but you're still mostly on your own.

gosub 16y ago

If I remember correctly, in one of the SICP video lecture, Hal Abelson says that s-exprs are equivalent to the the syntax tree of the program and, given a graphical interface, we would be manipulating this tree directly. AppInventor for Android is the most similar thing we have today, and not surprisingly it's based on Kawa scheme. It would be a very powerful mode of code editing, if it wasn't centered around click and drag operations (and limited to android). I think that a modal editor ala VIM, paired with a graphical code-block environment and fuzzy text autocompletion, would be a nearly perfect IDE.

br1 16y ago

The author overestimates the quality of designer tools.

torme 16y ago
Agreed, as an occasional user of After Effects, I can state with certainty that buggy software in media editing definitely exists.

apl 16y ago

I'd rather spend my working life in Emacs than in Photoshop, but I guess just as anything else, UI preferences differ.

msmith 16y ago

I really wonder how much time the author has spent with a modern IDE like Eclipse. For Java development, it really does have all of the features on his wish list, or something equivalent.

miloshh 16y ago
Indeed, Eclipse for Java is just unbeatable. I just recently started using it for C++ and it also works surprisingly well. I find myself much more productive than in a text editor, especially in a large code base I didn't know before.
gb 16y ago
That was my thought too, Eclipse JDT at least is pretty impressive, some of the other plugins not so much. I was surprised to see IntelliJ mentioned as supposedly good too, I wouldn't say it's terrible, but I find it somewhat lacking in comparison to JDT.

points 16y ago

I don't think it's a good comparison. And the author just comes across as "wah! programming is hard! sob".

primigenus 16y ago

We attempted to solve a lot of these problems in our online HTML/CSS/JS editor/prototyping tool, http://quplo.com http://quplo.com. We also wrote about our frustrations with IDEs earlier this year: http://blog.quplo.com/2010/04/the-modern-ide-sucks/ http://blog.quplo.com/2010/04/the-modern-ide-sucks/ Some things we tried to fix: - The file system; you don't need one when you're building an HTML prototype. Instead you have sheets, where you can organise multiple "files" (URIs, basically) based around how you want to organise, not how some arbitrary hierarchy of nested folders wants you to. - Code completion; intellisense and other completion usually pops up an alphabetic list of everything available in the namespace. In the case of CSS, typing "a" presents you with autocomplete starting with "azimuth". When do you ever need azimuth? So instead, we built "common sense code completion", where the likely most-used properties are surfaced at the top of the list. Now, writing HTML and CSS is mostly a case of pressing tab a lot, and up or down when you don't want the auto-suggested default. - Browser-based; why even write code in a desktop IDE, especially HTML/CSS? Doing in the browser has so many advantages, such as web browsers' awesome tab features or, since it's a web app, everything you write being instantly available online. - Collaboration; as a web app, no more checking in and updating. We handle version management and you just work on your code with your team (long term: Google-style realtime collaboration?) There's a lot to improve about today's IDEs. We got started on one specific for simple HTML development. Someone else should solve this problem for programming languages.

nailer 16y ago
If you change your mind and consider doing Python or Ruby as well as HTML, count me in as a customer.

doki_pen 16y ago

I've worked on java projects in both vi and eclipse. While ramp up on larger projects generally takes longer in vi, I feel like the payoff is worth it. What eclipse does for you in suggesting classes become memory muscle pretty quickly in vi. At which point, eclipses slowness is just crippling. If someone could make an IDE that was fast, and could figure out the project completely from my build tool without nudging, I might enjoy it. I just don't see how a more feature rich IDE is going to be faster and less buggy.

jsvaughan 16y ago
How do you do refactoring in vi? Do you really search and replace?
- doki_pen 16y ago
  Yes. It depends on the case, but sed, awk and grep are also useful.

akkartik 16y ago

He's focusing on tool support (for manipulating representations of code), but languages (representations) could do with improvement as well. Or perhaps you could think about both together. How would you coevolve a language with tools? If you could make assumptions about the tools people have, how would that change the language? Ah, that's just smalltalk. Done.

dgallagher 16y ago

Per Apple, Xcode 4 will have a feature that auto-fixes certain coding mistakes, like missing semi-colons: http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html#fix-it http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html...

lelele 16y ago

Why do you complain about IDEs when most popular languages are Java, C, C++, ecc.? (see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....) IDEs can't be better than languages they deal with, because languages shape the way programmers think. Clunky languages call for clunky IDEs.

sedachv 16y ago

Haha, only yesterday I mentioned Interlisp sedit on HN. Welcome to the world of the 1970s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor There's a reason these things weren't all that popular.

sedachv 16y ago
Oh boy, and who could forget DWIM. I'm sure if the concept of refactoring existed back then (it didn't; apparently L Peter Deutsch would just throw out your code and start again if he didn't like it) there would be some really cool tools for that too.
- sedachv 16y ago
  Classic: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o4niyIQ6_O8J:www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/interlisp/Teitelman-FCJJ1972.pdf+programmers+assistant&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShJgKd9Srkt1d1ks_l5JJIQe7Hf4KtT_GVHoHPhmL3MShAYgqrRCr1t1WXoOhg2wa65I7aN244UFvbWAhvJL2IKv0lVTEjSCNGKhWoPVxvniC-gc3go5S7uduKgcMNQrFSGvxYH&sig=AHIEtbT8xcDYio5z9BYceJ7o0c5FXsds4A http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o4niyIQ6_O8J:w... For all the hating, automating programming is an obvious thing to do (the idea is both trivial and quite profound: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645338 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645338), and there are some really cool ideas there (reversible debugging being one).
acqq 16y ago
Or the tools that were supposed to "just draw" OO programs, nineties. There's a reason these things nobody uses today.

ghempton 16y ago

It's funny, when I use the programs he mentions, I always wish I had some code to manipulate rather than use some esoteric GUI.

seldo 16y ago

I could not agree more. Given that IDEs are the primary tools of programmers, and unlike Photoshop users our primary skill is to build software itself, why are IDEs not the most advanced pieces of software that exist? It seems logical. They have the most advanced users; they don't need to worry about scaring the kids at home. They should be constantly adopting the latest and greatest in performance and UX. Instead we have vim and emacs which, beloved as they are, still have as their primary interface a grid of characters -- not just the code itself, but the user interface. It's like nothing has changed in terms of the graphical output capabilities of computers since the late 1970s. (And yes, there are WIMP versions, which add drop-down menus. But the primary interface mechanism is still keyboard shortcuts.) Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world, certainly the download takes long enough and there are enough configuration options. Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal that frustrated coders return to vim and emacs so they can get something done. Version control -- a critical function for all modern programmers -- is still largely handled on the command line. Maybe, if you're lucky, you get a side-by-side comparison in Eclipse (but not for git, yet!), but as far as tagging and branching goes, graphical representations are out. WTF? I'm so glad to see this article, because I have spent so long in the company of programmers who hear me ranting about IDEs and just tell me to "use vim", as if that were the problem.

miloshh 16y ago
> Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world... Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal... I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...
- seldo 16y ago
  I used it for years and finally switched away in disgust at the performance. NetBeans is very similar but much faster. (But still terrible, in lots of ways. I've yet to meet an IDE I didn't hate)

shelfu 16y ago

"At least I’ve heard IntelliJ IDEA is great, I’ve never used it." That's like complaining about image manipulation software when all you've used is GIMP. I'm a vim guy from way back, I always avoided big IDEs because of the bloat. IDEA is the first I've tried where the IDE doesn't feel like it's getting in the way, and actually makes the job easier.

bokchoi 16y ago
And the IdeaVIM plugin isn't half bad either.

stcredzero 16y ago

but languages are written in text and IDEs are basically text editors with a few extra features. Not necessarily. The text editor features of most Smalltalk IDEs were pretty gimpy, but the text editing was never the exciting part! It's the whole environment being like iPython on steroids everywhere and all the time.

ynniv 16y ago

Adobe has probably made billions of dollars on Photoshop, and has thousands of people working on improving interaction with a regular grid of color values. This is a high profit, low complexity situation. Most developers are not willing to spend $700 on an editor, and the gamut of programming language source code syntaxes is too broad for a single editor to work uniformly across them. But really, comparing anything to Photoshop is silly. Some music sequencing programs will in fact allow you to create measures with the wrong number of beats, and have annoying, unproductive interfaces. Premiere is actually really annoying to work with, which sent a lot of people over to Final Cut. Even extremely similar programs like Adobe Illustrator are fraught with miserable design and crappy storage formats. The OP has valid points, but these apply to most software, and not just IDE's.

jasonkester 16y ago
I'd spend $700 on a truly good IDE, and so should any programmer capable of doing simple arithmetic. Calculate how much more productive you can be using the best tools available, then figure out how many hours at your bill rate it will take to make back that investment. For something like IntelliJ ($$$, but awesome) versus Eclipse (free, but crap), most people will find that they break even in less than a week. Assuming you expect your programming career to be longer than that, it's not a tough decision to make.
- ynniv 16y ago
  A few programmers will pay a lot of money, but most programmers seem to be uninterested in paying more than $70. Compared this to photographers, who will almost universally pay $700. The market is much larger.
  - adbachman 16y ago
    I worked for a large manufacturing / consumer product company as a .NET developer and the four people on my team all had top level MSDN subscriptions. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx ) I think the number I heard for our team, just MSDN subscriptions, was around $25000 a year.

JesseAldridge 16y ago

My first guess was that the programming market was just too small for commercial tools to make a profit. But that doesn't seem to be the case. "Graphic designers held about 286,100 jobs in 2008." http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos090.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos090.htm "Computer software engineers and computer programmers held about 1.3 million jobs in 2008." http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm So now I'm thinking the main problem is that it's hard to compete with open source. There are just so many good-enough open source programming tools out there. Commercial tools not only have to better than the open source stuff, they have to be way better. This is because of all the costs involved with adopting a new IDE: Not just the price of the software, but the time spent learning a new environment and getting it configured right are significant time investments. So open source eats away at the margins of commercial tools, which leads to less people working on commercial tools, which drives more people to the open source incumbents, etc. I believe pg says open source is bad at design. That seems right to me. Open source is good at copying existing tools, but not so good at innovating. So we end up at a local maxima where all programming tools are decent, but not great.

jasonkester 16y ago

Any other VS.NET/ReSharper folks get halfway through his list of things that IDEs don't do, quietly noting that our IDE does in fact do them, then quit reading? That's one of the big benefits of a compiled language like C#. The IDE can be continuously background-compiling, making things like Refactor/Rename work like the author wishes it would instead of replacing strings. Same with Find Usages, Find Declaration, and Automatically Import the Stuff I Need. Every time I wander off into Ruby or Python, I end up coming back a little bit sad. Such nice languages, but the tools just can't hang.

someone_here 16y ago
Which brings up a good point: Where are the Javascript IDEs?
- dagw 16y ago
  JetBrains WebStorm. While not really up to level of some of the better IDEs for other languages, it's probably the best JavaScript IDE currently available.
- Afton 16y ago
  I've used both vim and Visual Studio. The latter was surprisingly good, providing reasonable code-completion. (disclaimer: I currently work at MSFT, but am not anywhere near the VS team).
- sireat 16y ago
  This might sound heretical, but I find that current Eclipse 3.6 for Javascript is not bad at all. http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide-javascript-web-developers/heliossr1 http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide-javasc... Since hard drive space is cheap, I have different Eclipse installations for each language I use. This seems to cut down on plugin hell and slowdowns that people often complain about. I can't comment on how good Eclipse is actually for web development, but for embedded Javascript scripting it works splendidly. Most precisely, it lets me zoom in and out of abstractions in a large project with multiple files with ease.

gurraman 16y ago

I'm perfectly happy with the tools I use when programming. The tools I use to manipulate images and photos on the other hand... they're big and clunky, force me to use constipated shortcuts, are tedious to install, cannot be run remotely (well, effectively), they crash and aren't that easy for me to extend. I'm, sort of, working on the opposite problem: I'm tossing a few hours towards a way to manipulate images without the "IDE".

Tyr42 16y ago
How about things like ImageMagick?[1] Command line or from a programming language. No IDE at all. I've used it in the past, and it's useful for batch operations. [1]http://www.imagemagick.org/ http://www.imagemagick.org/

dstorrs 16y ago

====QUOTE How come I can still have syntax errors? How come it is ever possible to have a syntax error in a program? Shouldn’t the IDE at least be helping me to have a valid program all the time? Finale doesn’t let you write a measure with the wrong number of beats and then complain when you push play. It just fixes it for you — “oh look, you need a rest there.” ====/QUOTE Oh Luke Palmer, no. NO. The absolute last thing I want from my editor is for it to be modifying the code without my explicit request. Then if something breaks, I need to worry about whether I broke it or whether the editor broke it. (And yes, yes, I know, the compiler "modifies my code", blah blah.)

brudgers 16y ago

Oddly, I have been thinking exactly the opposite - what aspects of IDE's are missing from graphics programs. Among the features of IDE's that programs like AutoCAD and Photoshop lack are continuous error checking and validation. They provide little feedback regarding proper document organization or standards and specifications compliance as part of a typical work flow. In addition, some IDE's offer direct visual feedback regarding user interface design along the same lines (though not necessarily to the same degree) as graphics software. edit: I'm not saying that these features are impossible to implement, rather that implementing them is not feasible for the typical user(victim).

aufreak3 16y ago

My personal IDE wish list below (some simple, some not so, and necessarily incomplete) - 1. Copy-paste abstraction - When you copy a snippet from one part to another, automatically lift it out as a function first. If it can't be abstracted for some reason, alert! 2. Path finder - I have A,B,C and I want to get X,Y,Z. Find me a path through the libraries please. We created Prolog. Can we use it for this? Even guesses are useful. Hoogle is a start (thanks Curry and Howard!). The ABCXYZ can be abstract descriptions like type, or example data. 3. Debugger time travel - move back and forth in time freely, allowing code modification. Me got tons of RAM+disk for history and branching. .. and why can't something get unwritten from a file? 4. Breaking news - when I modify a function that could break something else, tell me now. 5. Link function arguments to in-source example data for testing and exploration. I love to start with data first before writing anything. 6. Embed images and live code snippets as documentation. Ever drew ascii diagrams in source code? Mathematica notebooks have solved this and more already. 7. Function grapher - select an expression and show as graph. At least what "Grapher" on MacOSX provides. The IDE should know basic mathematics - like mathematica. 8. (extension of 7) Design at least simple functions graphically. 9. Spell check myIdentifierNames dammit!

stevejohnson 16y ago
Currently working on (4) from the SCM angle. My buddy and I have been lazy bloggers, but we're still coding. http://timunionsteve.posterous.com/ http://timunionsteve.posterous.com/

skoni 16y ago

The Code Bubbles Project is an attempt to rethink the UI of IDEs: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm

fish2000 16y ago

Ah, the grass is always greener. The adobe tools mentioned are excellent for what they do, but they are never without interface quirks that can range from mildly irritating to bizarre -- I have consistently found the Edit Styles box in InDesign to work counterintuitively in small ways, like forgetting that I checked 'preview' or overwriting my edits if a dropdown has been incorrectly fiddled with. Adobe stuff also completely lacks decent version control. "Version Cue" is pretty clunky and has no conception of diff-ing. If I make edits to the story in an InDesign file and replace 3 FPO images with real ones, why can't I have a repository I can browse, in which I can see an awesome and self-explanatory visualization of these changes? Maybe you need InCopy servers for something like that but I don't think that's a feature they have. Contrastingly, with the latest XCode preview, versioning was almost seamless and very nice to work with. After installing the XCode preview, I was able to check out a project from GitHub, run it, edit it, and commit the changes, with a lovely two-pane view of the diff in question when committing, showing additions and deletions. I didn't have to think about it at all -- it was only "almost" seamless as I had to manually do 'git push', which I'm sure they'll fix that in the final release. You can do scripting with JavaScript inside the Adobe apps, but it's slow and the API takes some considerable getting-used-to. Some things most programmers would consider scriptable are not: I'd love to be able to bust out a regex or some conditional logic when building a Photoshop automation, for example; the current interface for that feels condescending and ridiculous if you're coming from TextMate or emacs. Always greener. I'm just sayin.

jeffffff 16y ago

a lot of it has to do with programmers bitching about bad programs way more than users of those other programs. he has obviously never used protools or any audio editing program. protools is one of the best out there, but it is still awful, as are the rest of them. it took digidesign almost a year to add support for leopard and then they charged $150 for the update.

mindcreek 16y ago

just learn to use a good text editor like emacs or vim, I use emacs and it fits me like glow whatever text based activity I am currently engaging at that moment. And yes there can be better IDEs but I wont be using them.

spektom 16y ago

> How come I can still have syntax errors? Google's App Inventor prevents you from making syntax errors, since you use code blocks instead of writing source code. Actually, if you use code templates that any modern IDE has, it helps you to avoid most syntax errors as well...