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Being able to manipulate language-sensitive components is very handy; being restricted to manipulating them can be mind-bogglingly annoying... for people, the s
by snogglethorpe 14y ago
Being able to manipulate language-sensitive components is very handy; being restricted to manipulating them can be mind-bogglingly annoying... for people, the source text is also a text.
Structure editors were super trendy ... like 25 years ago. There's a good reason they've pretty much died out...
- nailer 14y agoWhy would it be annoying to not be able to write invalid code? Source is not free text, that's provable by needing a parser. Much in the same way the DOM isn't HTML, a lesson already learnt the hard way in web development.
- snogglethorpe 14y agoMy statement isn't based on pontificating, it's based on lots of people writing structure-editors and everybody hating them. Despite the end-goal being a correct parse-tree, it turns out that making it impossible to have intermediate "incorrect" states feels very constricting, and people don't like it. The surface text representation may be an irrelevant detail to the compiler, but it's not to humans. [A lot of the research was aimed at beginners, without previous programming/editor experience, who probably have the most to gain from such assistance (no missing semicolons!), and no prior habits to unlearn. But even there, structure-editors were not popular.]