A solution half-way to what you're talking about (it still utilises text editing) is Paredit/Parinfer for Lisp languages. They allow you to directly edit the program's abstract syntax tree. When coupled with a REPL you can evaluate sections of the syntax tree at will. It gives the dev a much finer grain of control than even the smallest unit test.
Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
31–40 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#32Along with what others have said, Unreal's Blueprint editor does precisely this.
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#33We could have our cake and eat it too in this case.
All an IDE should do is not allow freeform editing of text but rather only editing of text that relates to the AST - in other words, creating an AST by carefully selected text.
This would solve the issue of readability while enhancing the programming experience.
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#34Previous related discussions that may contain insights: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13578256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13773813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14278605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14609215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1516003…
how do you keep track of these things for future reference? Browser history or something more involved than that?
I Googled :P
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#35I "learned" coding with LabView. It's "graphical programming". After three years and ever-increasingly complex programs, I was longing to use a text-based editor. LV is super practical for "quick and dirty" device control, but beyond that, it's an inefficient grind of connecting things.
LabView wasn't my first language but I used it a lot at my first job out of college and I felt the same way about it. It was great for communicating with all sorts of RF test equipment but it was terrible to do all the processing afterwards.
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#36Previous related discussions that may contain insights: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13578256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13773813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14278605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14609215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1516003…
With titles and dates:
Lamdu - towards the next generation IDE (peaker.github.io) Dec 25, 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964369
Programmer Tooling Beyond Plain Text (joelburget.com) May 5, 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495836
Prune: A Tree-Based, Home-Row-Oriented Code Editor (facebook.com) Aug 21, 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099611
Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014) (pcmonk.me) Feb 6, 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13578256
Cirru – An editor for AST (cirru.org) Mar 2, 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13773813
Code as text is a problem (dohgramming.com) May 6, 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14278605
Frame-Based Editing [pdf] (kcl.ac.uk) June 22, 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14609215
Searching a Million Lines of Lisp (wilfred.me.uk) Sept 3, 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160030
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#37> Is there such an IDE? IntelliJ Idea isn't exactly it, but it has many of the features you want (most comprehensively/maturely for Java, but to greater or lesser extents for Python, Go, Rust, Typescript, etc). I find using it feels less like editing text, and more like constructing a program at a conceptual level, than in any other environment I've used professionally. > declare a function You can use a function/met…
It’s interesting to see some people preferring other ides/editors than intellij. For instance, vscode is exceptional, but I still far prefer webstorm because it has so many great features.
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#38What about Node Red or Apache Nifi?
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#39One view of things is that code is more Poetry than a lot of people give it credit for. The formatting of code and usage of whitespace is as much aesthetic / creative space as it is technical requirement (depending on the language of course; whitespace is more syntactically necessary in Python than say C, obviously).
I am sure there are classical poets that would happily engage in the tabs versus spaces debate, and even some of the other formatting debates in the code world. Concepts like rhythm and structure from the poetry world directly apply to code formatting, because they affect how we as people read the code. Programmers just don't often think to use the same terms for such isomorphic concepts. Yet it also speaks to how so many code formatting arguments get to be so heated: it can be deeply, personal, subjective, aesthetic.
(When we are squashing personal freedom/creativity in our "mandated" formats or automated formatters should we sometimes wonder that maybe we are losing our chance at finding the programming equivalents of great poets that might stun, delight, or otherwise bring emotion to us with their code? We have things like the IOCCC that celebrates one extreme of code formatting [obfuscated], but should we find other ways to celebrate well and uniquely formatted code?)
Re: Ask HN: Why is programming editing text?
#40It's a good question and even if the text approach is superior we need a better reason than typically given.
I mean think about it. Suppose you want to communicate a JSON object to another programmer.
You can say: "the object consists of three key value pairs, the first key is named ... and its value is ..., the second ..."
Or you can say: "the object is that which you get from parsing the string that spells thus: curly bracket, space, double quote, ..."
Of course you'd prefer the former approach! Why then when we wish to communicate to a computer the same object, we adopt the "spelling approach"?