Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive • Hacker News Board

Re: Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive

#31

Post by steveklabnik » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 6:44 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #30

steveklabnik wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text is the universal interface. It's the Way of Unix. As far as showing/hiding this kind of thing, vim at least can collapse function definitions, I'd be suprised if other editors could not.

Hypertext-like linking and hiding is so universal nowadays, why do we have to parse whatever language just to achieve it? That's a lot of complex programming work we could avoid, and channel that effort into making cooler tools. (It's not just parsing . We have to write little tools to take the parsed code, then infer relationships within it. Why not just make explicit links?)

Are you trying to say that we wouldn't have to parse hypertext? I'm sorry, I'm not understanding your argument.

Re: Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive

#32

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 7:20 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #31

stcredzero wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypertext-like linking and hiding is so universal nowadays, why do we have to parse whatever language just to achieve it? That's a lot of complex programming work we could avoid, and channel that effort into making cooler tools. (It's not just parsing . We have to write little tools to take the parsed code, then infer relationships within it. Why not just make explicit links?)

Are you trying to say that we wouldn't have to parse hypertext? I'm sorry, I'm not understanding your argument.

We'd only have to write parsers for the hypertext, not N different parsers for the various languages.

Think about what happens. Your IDE parses your source code so that it can do things like highlighting, identifying senders, code folding, etc. It does this so that you as a programmer can use those tools to more easily parse it in your head to understand it. Eventually, your code is interpreted or compiled, which involves another parsing.

Why not just have a direct representation of the program and its interrelationships? Languages where the compiler/interpreter make the AST available go a part of the way there. But too many of the interrelationships are implicit, requiring a program to do some sort of searching/indexing/parsing to make available. Why not just represent those directly, and have source code be a representation?

If we could make such a representation, we might even be able to transcend the tyranny of particular languages. (Multi language VMs are somehow related here.)

Re: Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive

#33

Post by stcredzero » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 7:22 PM UTC

jefffoster wrote: post #29

stcredzero wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we still programming in text ? We spend so much time now with making fancy editors and IDEs that make souce code appear like hypertext. This shows that we have outgrown text. Why aren't we programming in some sort of hypertext that makes showing/hiding this stuff trivial? (Just for starters.)

You might be interested in some of the ideas of Subtext ( http://www.subtextual.org/ ). "Subtext takes the position that both text and diagrams have the same inherent limitation: they are paper-based media. Subtext represents programs as complex data structures that can not be fully printed out in a human-readable form. Text and diagrams are used to interactively present the program, not as a source encoding of it. T…

The problem with the metaphor, is that WYSIWYG word processing is really only arranging dark rectangles on a bigger white rectangle. Programming is much more complex -- it is as complex as writing. Word processors don't have to deal with writing. Instead, they deal with typography, and large-scale structure. Semantic interrelationships are still left up to the human tool user.

Re: Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive

#34

Post by twopoint718 » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 9:22 PM UTC

utx00 wrote: post #8

licoresse wrote: post #6

How retarded, look at Clojure instead

retarded is too harsh :) however the same can be accomplished through macros in a way that is better integrated with the language (when debugging lombok generated code lombok tags are not of much use i would imagine, forcing one to understand the generated code). something like: (defdata mountain name :setter :getter latitude :getter etc ...) might not be too hard to implement on top of clos (or on top of defstruct -…

Clojure would look something like this:

    (defstruct mountain :name :latitude :longitude :country) 
    (struct mountain "Zugspitze" 47.416667 10.983333 "Germany")

Re: Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive

#35

Post by licoresse » Mon, Aug 03, 2009, 9:45 PM UTC

fogus wrote: post #13

licoresse wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Clojure is a lisp for java, written in java and itself, published as a jar.

And your point is? Because it is written in Java and packaged as a jar does nothing to convince my boss and team members that we should write all of our code in Clojure. I wish it were that easy.

I cannot help you with that. Maybe you should be on the outloook of more interesting things to do? I don't know...

Re: Still using java? Lombok can make you more productive

#36

Post by steveklabnik » Tue, Aug 04, 2009, 12:01 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #32

steveklabnik wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to say that we wouldn't have to parse hypertext? I'm sorry, I'm not understanding your argument.

We'd only have to write parsers for the hypertext, not N different parsers for the various languages. Think about what happens. Your IDE parses your source code so that it can do things like highlighting, identifying senders, code folding, etc. It does this so that you as a programmer can use those tools to more easily parse it in your head to understand it. Eventually, your code is interpreted or compiled, which inv…

I'm not sure what advantages a language in this form would have. Why bother mandating that it be stored like this in some way? Storing programs as text like we do now would enable a tool to display code just as you suggest, just check out the many code-to-html tools that are available.

I'm also not sure why I'd care that my tool parses the code to do those things for me, nor why having my brain parse the code matters in particular. If you're arguing for Lisp's "code as AST" syntax, well, that's fine by me, but I don't think it's a neccesity. Macros work best with sexps, it's true, but I've never found, say, Ruby's metaprogramming to be wanting for Lisp-style macros.

Also, I'm firmly against the One True Language way of thinking. See, for instance, Python vs. Ruby as a great example of why nobody will ever be happy with One Language to Rule Them All. They're so close to each other, yet their small differences cause so much argument between the two camps.