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"Code-as-Text" is way too universal and deeply ingrained to change in the short to medium term. I've worked a bit with low code / no code platforms and everythi

"Code-as-Text" is way too universal and deeply ingrained to change in the short to medium term. I've worked a bit with low code / no code platforms and everything becomes a mess: little to no version control, search is bad, no import or possibility to generate components programmatically,... However, I'm totally with you on having the editor show the code as you'd like. As much as I don't like tabs, at least the user could choose their preferred width for indentation. (A less disruptive Python-with-braces could be the editor showing braces but converting to spaces behind the scene.)

quectophoton 2y ago
> However, I'm totally with you on having the editor show the code as you'd like. Such editors would remove some categories bikeshedding, but would add brand new categories of bikeshedding. * Why did/didn't you add an empty line (EDIT: or whatever no-op visual equivalent) after that `if` block? My editor needs blocks to be separated a certain way to be able to display them nicely grouped in logical blocks! This representation of AST is so limited that we can't store such differences in style, we need editors that work at some super-AST level! * What do you mean my code is an unreadable mess with hundreds of operations? All I see in my editor is a nice single operation "copy fields from class X to struct Y". If your editor can't detect such an obvious thing from the AST and display it nicely, then find a better one. * Some codebases not even bothering with functions because the founding engineers use a specific IDE that just lets them group code arbitrarily (no no that's not reinventing functions, that's what progress looks like!), and you can't use your favorite editor because that's not on the scope of that editor, so the editor's author politely tells you to use that other editor you dislike if you really need such a thing. * I can probably come up with more scenarios if I spend more time thinking about it. And there's probably also more petty scenarios that I can't even imagine. I'm not saying such editors wouldn't be nice. Everyone has their own preferences, and some people might work better this way. Just, don't expect them to reduce the amount of petty bikeshedding in projects, much less eliminate it.

quectophoton 2y ago

> However, I'm totally with you on having the editor show the code as you'd like. Such editors would remove some categories bikeshedding, but would add brand new categories of bikeshedding. * Why did/didn't you add an empty line (EDIT: or whatever no-op visual equivalent) after that `if` block? My editor needs blocks to be separated a certain way to be able to display them nicely grouped in logical blocks! This representation of AST is so limited that we can't store such differences in style, we need editors that work at some super-AST level! * What do you mean my code is an unreadable mess with hundreds of operations? All I see in my editor is a nice single operation "copy fields from class X to struct Y". If your editor can't detect such an obvious thing from the AST and display it nicely, then find a better one. * Some codebases not even bothering with functions because the founding engineers use a specific IDE that just lets them group code arbitrarily (no no that's not reinventing functions, that's what progress looks like!), and you can't use your favorite editor because that's not on the scope of that editor, so the editor's author politely tells you to use that other editor you dislike if you really need such a thing. * I can probably come up with more scenarios if I spend more time thinking about it. And there's probably also more petty scenarios that I can't even imagine. I'm not saying such editors wouldn't be nice. Everyone has their own preferences, and some people might work better this way. Just, don't expect them to reduce the amount of petty bikeshedding in projects, much less eliminate it.