3 ms·

Over all my years it's become clear to me that this attitude of refusing to give up a specific tool (and it's always something married to plain 1d text) is the

Over all my years it's become clear to me that this attitude of refusing to give up a specific tool (and it's always something married to plain 1d text) is the biggest thing holding out industry back. I don't know if you can convince people to do it, but I'm glad somebody's trying.

imglorp 7y ago
I'm glad someone's trying also. And the reason 1d text is hard to get rid of is not merely an editor (ie, an "app") but a galaxy of languages, tools, and operating systems built around 1d character streams. Everything from the serial driver to the style sheet can be manipulated with primatives for mapping, filtering, and composing character streams and operations on them. There ARE a bunch of benefits to structured code, for example Docker and npm/pip/etc have recently showed us a hint of what composition of standard components can bring. What might be missing from structured code is the rest of the primitives on ASTs. Once we have all that we can talk about backporting to emacs :)
- icebraining 7y ago
  All code is structured, otherwise it couldn't be compiled/interpreted. The Go community, for example, doesn't need to store their code in some sort of custom binary format to apply changes: gofix works fine with plain text. Text is just a serialization format for those ASTs, no different than any binary format.
jrockway 7y ago
I think people don't want to leave their editor because navigating and typing code is a large part of programming. If you try some new editor, it's always going to be pretty wonky. For example, I've been using the Arduino IDE recently. I am used to navigating lines with C-n and C-p. It's something I do thousands of times a day. In the Arduino IDE, those keys create a new sketch (something I want to do maybe once a week) and print the current sketch (something I imagine nobody wants to do ever). The UI is just not thought out at all. I don't think I'm being resistant to change. I think their IDE is just garbage. Some people have done new IDEs well, VSCode comes to mind. But replicating 40 years of features is not going to happen overnight, and some of those features are actually important. Figuring out which ones are the key. If you don't hit a developer's critical set of features, they aren't going to use your thing.
icebraining 7y ago
What do you see we could improve if we only left text? I've read the promise many times, but never actually saw any convincing reasons. Text is just another format anyway.

imglorp 7y ago

I'm glad someone's trying also. And the reason 1d text is hard to get rid of is not merely an editor (ie, an "app") but a galaxy of languages, tools, and operating systems built around 1d character streams. Everything from the serial driver to the style sheet can be manipulated with primatives for mapping, filtering, and composing character streams and operations on them. There ARE a bunch of benefits to structured code, for example Docker and npm/pip/etc have recently showed us a hint of what composition of standard components can bring. What might be missing from structured code is the rest of the primitives on ASTs. Once we have all that we can talk about backporting to emacs :)

icebraining 7y ago
All code is structured, otherwise it couldn't be compiled/interpreted. The Go community, for example, doesn't need to store their code in some sort of custom binary format to apply changes: gofix works fine with plain text. Text is just a serialization format for those ASTs, no different than any binary format.

jrockway 7y ago

I think people don't want to leave their editor because navigating and typing code is a large part of programming. If you try some new editor, it's always going to be pretty wonky. For example, I've been using the Arduino IDE recently. I am used to navigating lines with C-n and C-p. It's something I do thousands of times a day. In the Arduino IDE, those keys create a new sketch (something I want to do maybe once a week) and print the current sketch (something I imagine nobody wants to do ever). The UI is just not thought out at all. I don't think I'm being resistant to change. I think their IDE is just garbage. Some people have done new IDEs well, VSCode comes to mind. But replicating 40 years of features is not going to happen overnight, and some of those features are actually important. Figuring out which ones are the key. If you don't hit a developer's critical set of features, they aren't going to use your thing.

icebraining 7y ago

What do you see we could improve if we only left text? I've read the promise many times, but never actually saw any convincing reasons. Text is just another format anyway.