3 ms·

How are you defining an "interesting" language? Just your opinion? I'd say C# is a pretty interesting and powerful language that's extremely well-complemented b

How are you defining an "interesting" language? Just your opinion? I'd say C# is a pretty interesting and powerful language that's extremely well-complemented by VS. There's a lot more to an IDE than code generation and autocomplete (even if those are very useful and save me a ton of time). Finding all references to a variable or function (simple text searching does not do this nearly as well - the IDE actually analyzes the language and knows what points to what). Immediately letting you know if the syntax is wrong. Very visual and intuitive debugging (it goes to the line # and lets you hover over a variable to see its contents). Jumping to a variable's definition. There have been experiments with non-textual programming, such as Scratch, but it hasn't really proven to be very useful. If there's going to be some radical shift, it might come from AI and brain scanners maybe?

_random_ 13y ago
Furthermore Visual Studio let's you define custom debug visualisation quite easily: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13127/Create-a-Debugger-Visualizer-in-Lines-of-Code http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13127/Create-a-Debugger-... http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/eedc48e7-5169-40d3-b602-ad451990a420 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/eedc48e7-5169-... (but of course one has to think outside of the "evil MS" box)
deckiedan 13y ago
What I was meaning was 'very different from was done 20/30 years ago, but is actually practical, as powerful as languages from 20/30 years ago, and not just a tech demo...'. Yes, IDEs help a lot with some of those tasks. But we're really still improving programming in a very evolutionary way - which isn't bad. For sure c# is more powerful and interesting than 1990 era c++. But ultimately, it's not that different, really. To me, that's the interesting thing about lightroom, and all that stuff. We're able to explore some of the concepts of programming from the old smalltalk systems in a modern way. And maybe, we'll find ways of programming which do actually look different from the old ways. Maybe not. Visualising functions as things which we can glue together, transform, pass data through, etc. I'm very interested to see where it all goes.

_random_ 13y ago

Furthermore Visual Studio let's you define custom debug visualisation quite easily: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13127/Create-a-Debugger-Visualizer-in-Lines-of-Code http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13127/Create-a-Debugger-... http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/eedc48e7-5169-40d3-b602-ad451990a420 http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/eedc48e7-5169-... (but of course one has to think outside of the "evil MS" box)

deckiedan 13y ago

What I was meaning was 'very different from was done 20/30 years ago, but is actually practical, as powerful as languages from 20/30 years ago, and not just a tech demo...'. Yes, IDEs help a lot with some of those tasks. But we're really still improving programming in a very evolutionary way - which isn't bad. For sure c# is more powerful and interesting than 1990 era c++. But ultimately, it's not that different, really. To me, that's the interesting thing about lightroom, and all that stuff. We're able to explore some of the concepts of programming from the old smalltalk systems in a modern way. And maybe, we'll find ways of programming which do actually look different from the old ways. Maybe not. Visualising functions as things which we can glue together, transform, pass data through, etc. I'm very interested to see where it all goes.