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I think the reason the text editor experience hasn't improved that much is because it's not often a bottleneck. Thinking and learning are the hardest parts of

I think the reason the text editor experience hasn't improved that much is because it's not often a bottleneck. Thinking and learning are the hardest parts of programming. Typing faster doesn't help that much.

skydhash 2y ago
And Emacs and VIM already have all the bits for improving your experience, but you have to integrate them yourselves. Or get an IDE that does it for the language you use. What you need to do is develop your own meta-language to shorten the time between idea and execution. Snippets, code generation, auto-completion, code analysis and navigation, all help.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
It is, but not directly. The practice of working directly on canonical plaintext representation is what's bottlenecking programming. At any given moment, the programmer cares about different aspects of code. One moment, they're trying to correctly structure an abstraction layer; an hour later, they may be debugging an issue that needs them to walk up and down the abstraction ladder several times. One moment, they need to understand the data flow on success path; the other, modify the overall parallelism characteristics of the program. Cramming all these conflicting requirements and cross-cutting concerns into the same files, to be read and written directly, is what's bottlenecking us. That's why we have never-ending holy wars on what is "clean code", why our editors work on such low conceptual level, why we get languages like Haskell or Rust, packed with cutting-edge math research output. We're hitting a Pareto frontier - trying to make some things more readable and explicit makes other things harder. The solution is to stop working on code files directly, and let software synthesize views amd editing interfaces - textual and graphical - on demand. Many perspectives on the same underlying artifact, that itself will not need to be optimized for human consumption.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > The solution is to stop working on code files directly, and let software synthesize views amd editing interfaces Problem is all such systems has proven to be worse than text on most dimensions.

skydhash 2y ago

And Emacs and VIM already have all the bits for improving your experience, but you have to integrate them yourselves. Or get an IDE that does it for the language you use. What you need to do is develop your own meta-language to shorten the time between idea and execution. Snippets, code generation, auto-completion, code analysis and navigation, all help.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

It is, but not directly. The practice of working directly on canonical plaintext representation is what's bottlenecking programming. At any given moment, the programmer cares about different aspects of code. One moment, they're trying to correctly structure an abstraction layer; an hour later, they may be debugging an issue that needs them to walk up and down the abstraction ladder several times. One moment, they need to understand the data flow on success path; the other, modify the overall parallelism characteristics of the program. Cramming all these conflicting requirements and cross-cutting concerns into the same files, to be read and written directly, is what's bottlenecking us. That's why we have never-ending holy wars on what is "clean code", why our editors work on such low conceptual level, why we get languages like Haskell or Rust, packed with cutting-edge math research output. We're hitting a Pareto frontier - trying to make some things more readable and explicit makes other things harder. The solution is to stop working on code files directly, and let software synthesize views amd editing interfaces - textual and graphical - on demand. Many perspectives on the same underlying artifact, that itself will not need to be optimized for human consumption.

Jensson 2y ago
> The solution is to stop working on code files directly, and let software synthesize views amd editing interfaces Problem is all such systems has proven to be worse than text on most dimensions.