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IDEas: Tools for Coders

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Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#11

Post by gngeal »

ericHosick wrote: post #6
sophacles wrote: post #2

Here's an IDE idea: create an industry standard plugin protocol. Most of the cool stuff an IDE does is code analysis and transformation e.g. refactoring, error analysis, and autofill. The other half is "makes coding pretty", "provides good shortcuts", and other UI considerations. Now for the latter - that is great, and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. And that is just a UX issue. For the former howeve…

> create an industry standard plugin protocol. I feel that Software Engineering/Science is lacking a body of knowledge: something which is basically required in other professional industries (architecture, medical, physics, electrical engineering), etc. Software Engineering/Science is at a disadvantage because there is no limitation placed on us by nature: an EE can't simply change the brightness of the sun to meet a…

an EE can't simply change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement. We can.

Wow, you can change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement?

BTW, there are quite a few limitations placed on you by nature: uncomputable numbers, NP-completness, ...

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#12

Post by charlieflowers »

I think for right now the main idea in the area of IDE features is to have an "open compiler" so that there is programmatic access to the abstract syntax tree of your programming languages (aka, "compiler as a service").

This has been a neat-o feature which slowly became nice-to-have, but it is fast becoming a requirement. For example, the JetBrains products (Idea, Resharper, etc.), and also what Google is doing with clang to help them manage their large C/C++ codebase.

We already compile/interpret our languages. So we need to open up that "machine understanding" to programmatic access, which IDE's and other tools can then use to do all kinds of nice things.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#14

Post by mdaniel »

ericHosick wrote: post #6
sophacles wrote: post #2

Here's an IDE idea: create an industry standard plugin protocol. Most of the cool stuff an IDE does is code analysis and transformation e.g. refactoring, error analysis, and autofill. The other half is "makes coding pretty", "provides good shortcuts", and other UI considerations. Now for the latter - that is great, and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. And that is just a UX issue. For the former howeve…

> create an industry standard plugin protocol. I feel that Software Engineering/Science is lacking a body of knowledge: something which is basically required in other professional industries (architecture, medical, physics, electrical engineering), etc. Software Engineering/Science is at a disadvantage because there is no limitation placed on us by nature: an EE can't simply change the brightness of the sun to meet a…

FWIW, there is a SEBOK ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Body_of_K... ) but I doubt it is what you had in mind.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#15

Post by al2o3cr »

sophacles wrote: post #2

Here's an IDE idea: create an industry standard plugin protocol. Most of the cool stuff an IDE does is code analysis and transformation e.g. refactoring, error analysis, and autofill. The other half is "makes coding pretty", "provides good shortcuts", and other UI considerations. Now for the latter - that is great, and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. And that is just a UX issue. For the former howeve…

"Here's an IDE idea: create an industry standard plugin protocol. "

Just what we need - now there will be N+1 incompatible protocols!

(shamelessly stolen from xkcd)

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#16

Post by jacabado »

charlieflowers wrote: post #12

I think for right now the main idea in the area of IDE features is to have an "open compiler" so that there is programmatic access to the abstract syntax tree of your programming languages (aka, "compiler as a service"). This has been a neat-o feature which slowly became nice-to-have, but it is fast becoming a requirement. For example, the JetBrains products (Idea, Resharper, etc.), and also what Google is doing with…

Roslyn from Microsoft is also an initiative in this direction.

But it has been on beta for almost 3 years I think. I wonder if it will ever go forward.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#17

Post by krrishd »

I think it would be interesting to see some design mockups of these concepts, which would make it more clear to the people behind prominent IDE's what they would look like ideally.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#18

Post by jimbokun »

ericHosick wrote: post #6
sophacles wrote: post #2

Here's an IDE idea: create an industry standard plugin protocol. Most of the cool stuff an IDE does is code analysis and transformation e.g. refactoring, error analysis, and autofill. The other half is "makes coding pretty", "provides good shortcuts", and other UI considerations. Now for the latter - that is great, and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. And that is just a UX issue. For the former howeve…

> create an industry standard plugin protocol. I feel that Software Engineering/Science is lacking a body of knowledge: something which is basically required in other professional industries (architecture, medical, physics, electrical engineering), etc. Software Engineering/Science is at a disadvantage because there is no limitation placed on us by nature: an EE can't simply change the brightness of the sun to meet a…

"I've put a lot of thought (about 6 years now) into a way to standardization communication between software systems and even parts of software. It's a hard problem to crack."

HTTP?

It's not perfect, but it seems to be what our industry has settled on as the universal way for pieces of software to talk to each other.

If you are thinking in terms of the payload, JSON seems to be filling that role.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#19

Post by nzonbi »

yan wrote: post #3

I started implementing a few of these (and lots of others) ideas, and the issue isn't coming up with what to do, it's doing it intelligently. I have a small side project where I'm playing with AST rendering and the details are usually where you get tripped up.

I completely understand what you say, about the problem being in the details. For what is now one year, I have been working (on the side) on graphical code + special UI. Currently I am really happy with the prototypes that I have, and plan to continue working on it. I expect to have an actual product in some time, perhaps two years at my current work rate. I am also pondering if it would be possible to extract commercial benefit from such a product. My current plan is to release a free/open base version of the product with little restrictions. Over that, offer special enhanced versions. Perhaps a simplified educational version for kids to learn to code, a game programming version with openGL integrated, mostly targeted to young programmers, etc.

I think that for now the best way for me, to continue developing my product, is to continue working isolated from the world. At this stage is probably still early, but if anyone is interested to know more, and think that can provide something, I am open to considering possible partnership. Unfortunately at this point, I am not willing to share online any of the progress done.

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