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> The problem I've seen with this idea is that in order for it to work, you have to be willing to add more metadata to your program, because programs themselves
by trealira 3y ago
> The problem I've seen with this idea is that in order for it to work, you have to be willing to add more metadata to your program, because programs themselves don't have the necessary data in them. You can make it mandatory to your language, but than just raises the friction for people trying to use that language.
I'm confused by what you mean. Can you be more specific as to what sort of metadata that has to be embedded in the code would be needed?
I've never used it, but watching this Smalltalk-80 IDE demonstration seems like it could be a workable idea.
https://youtu.be/JLPiMl8XUKU?si=Hly_8m4GiaDSQmpn&t=269 https://youtu.be/JLPiMl8XUKU?si=Hly_8m4GiaDSQmpn&t=269
Edit: A more modern example using Pharo. You can see in the video that he's not accessing files, rather everything is sorted into packages and classes.
https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o?si=qibMeMOkKy7ao5Hb https://youtu.be/HOuZyOKa91o?si=qibMeMOkKy7ao5Hb
- jerf 3y agoI mean that if you are asking for something we don't currently have, it pretty much by construction has to be something that involves more data and metadata. IDEs already do a lot of this sort of thing with all languages. Slicing and dicing by functions and such is not that hard and I've seen any number of variations on it, but coherent views of any sizable code base do not arise from any amount of that. If you want a coherent view of the code base, you're going to need to provide more. One such example would be literate programming, something that a lot of people look over and pine for the end results, but aren't actually willing to put the effort in that is irreducibly necessary to obtain such results.