3 ms·

This isn't a pipe dream it's just dumb. Different languages are suitable for different tasks and communities grow up with different goals and acheivements to r

This isn't a pipe dream it's just dumb. Different languages are suitable for different tasks and communities grow up with different goals and acheivements to reflect that. Certain cultural movements are language agnostic (say, testing) but DSLs? HM type theory? Not so much. We can just look at how hard it is to compare programming languages through common benchmarks is to do to realize what a bad idea this is.

zaphar 14y ago
I don't know about you but getting real autocomplete and refactoring in Emacs for M languages is a dream come true for me. I don't want a different IDE for each language. I want one Editor to Rule Them All. Making the infrastructure to understand a programming language shareable between all the ways to edit/refactor/analyze code in that language is far from dumb. It's something Eclipse/IntelliJ/VisualStudio should have done a long long time ago. Heck I once attempted to pick apart the tooling in Eclipse into something I could use headless without booting the entire thing and the code was so tightly integrated into their GUI I gave up in disgust. I mean this is architecture 101. Clear API's and division of labor should have been on everyone's mind but instead the whole thing is a pile of spaghetti code. Even something as simple as a CLI interface to your IDE's language support features so I could integrate them into editor of my choice would have been smart. But no one did that. I work with 4 different languages minimum every day at work. I'm not going to context switch my editor/IDE for each one of them. For this reason I'm cheering Yegge on like mad. (Full disclosure: I work at google same as Yegge. I've had these opinions for longer than I've worked there though.)
- shasta 14y ago
  It is dumb the way it's phrased. The easiest way to achieve it is to define a super language that all other languages can be shallowly encodes into. Describing this as ambitious is dumb.
- jrockway 14y ago
  Incidentally, check out how Java indexing is implemented in Grok :)
- masklinn 14y ago
  > getting real autocomplete and refactoring in Emacs for M languages is a dream come true for me Even just one. The Python RefactoringBrowser takes tends of seconds just to make a mess of the whole thing. It's a nice effort, but it fails on both reliability and speed.

zaphar 14y ago

I don't know about you but getting real autocomplete and refactoring in Emacs for M languages is a dream come true for me. I don't want a different IDE for each language. I want one Editor to Rule Them All. Making the infrastructure to understand a programming language shareable between all the ways to edit/refactor/analyze code in that language is far from dumb. It's something Eclipse/IntelliJ/VisualStudio should have done a long long time ago. Heck I once attempted to pick apart the tooling in Eclipse into something I could use headless without booting the entire thing and the code was so tightly integrated into their GUI I gave up in disgust. I mean this is architecture 101. Clear API's and division of labor should have been on everyone's mind but instead the whole thing is a pile of spaghetti code. Even something as simple as a CLI interface to your IDE's language support features so I could integrate them into editor of my choice would have been smart. But no one did that. I work with 4 different languages minimum every day at work. I'm not going to context switch my editor/IDE for each one of them. For this reason I'm cheering Yegge on like mad. (Full disclosure: I work at google same as Yegge. I've had these opinions for longer than I've worked there though.)

shasta 14y ago
It is dumb the way it's phrased. The easiest way to achieve it is to define a super language that all other languages can be shallowly encodes into. Describing this as ambitious is dumb.
jrockway 14y ago
Incidentally, check out how Java indexing is implemented in Grok :)
masklinn 14y ago
> getting real autocomplete and refactoring in Emacs for M languages is a dream come true for me Even just one. The Python RefactoringBrowser takes tends of seconds just to make a mess of the whole thing. It's a nice effort, but it fails on both reliability and speed.