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My personal answer to the titular question is something like "there's only so much you can do with our predominant programming paradigm (i.e. plain-text)". Prog
by feifan 5y ago
My personal answer to the titular question is something like "there's only so much you can do with our predominant programming paradigm (i.e. plain-text)". Programming languages specifically can only make incremental improvements and/or tradeoffs in that medium.
Tools like IDEs, debuggers, visualizers, etc are more interesting, but I think their effectiveness is also limited (and creativity constrained) by having to work in a plain-text world.
Moving beyond plain-text is mostly a social dynamics/network effects problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if the intersection between people who are good at figuring out that distribution × people are who are deeply interested in how programming happens is actually quite small.
- sanxiyn 5y agoThis is why I am so hopeful for Pernosco, a better debugger with better interface. https://pernos.co/ https://pernos.co/
- c-cube 5y agoI think it's the opposite. If you give up on plain text, you forfeit a gigantic number of existing tools (git, grep, editors with their plugins, sed, etc.) and have to redo all of them from scratch. The big issues with making a new language in 2021 are more related to semantic tools, like a LSP server (in which parsing is just the first building block). Just like wiring a compiler is much more than just parsing.