3 ms·

An Editor for Composed Programs (2014)

• mcguire 8y ago
  "What I've discovered is that SDE is a wonderful way of guessing someone's age: those under 40 or so have rarely heard of SDE; and those above 45 [2] tend to either convulse in fits of laughter when it's mentioned, become very afraid, or assume I'm an idiot. In other words, those who know of SDE have a strong reaction to it (which, almost invariably, is against SDE)." Very, very true. The run-the-compiler-in-the-background approach is much more successful.
  • coliveira 8y ago
    This is an issue where there are possible compromises. For example, Smalltalk has achieved success being an SDE where you can edit methods, but not the structure of classes. This way, it is impossible to create invalid classes, but you can still edit methods inside the environment as if they were text files.
  • lgas 8y ago
    Would Emacs' paredit be considered SDE? If so, that would be a huge counterpoint. Everyone I've talked to that's gotten up to speed with it has loved it.
    • mcguire 8y ago
      As far as I know, it doesn't require that the file always be syntactically valid. It just helps you to do that.