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IDEas: Tools for Coders

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Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#21

Post by yan »

nzonbi wrote: post #19
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 commer…

I also have a few offshoot tool prototypes and a current side project into code visualization that I'm building, also not ready for public viewing. Get in touch if you're interested.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#22

Post by LordBron »

Jormundir wrote: post #9

Here's an idea: the world doesn't need more ideas, just more people implementing, so throwing out ideas as if they're original and have innate value is unhelpful.

I agree with the others. I think it's still useful to share, because in order to implement I need to build an entire IDE just to implement my features. That's an awful lot of work to see a feature request implemented.

I do agree that implementers are good though. As I mention in the post, I do have one more idea that I didn't share that I am going to build. I'll comment here again when I'm ready to announce it.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#23

Post by LordBron »

krrishd wrote: post #17

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.

I thought about doing mockups for the post, but decided it was already long enough as it was. I may break each one down into mockups still though and post them.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#24

Post by robert-wallis »

jimbokun wrote: post #18
ericHosick wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unix communicates via text, stdin stdout stderr. That's pretty much a standard.

Windows PowerShell communicates with typed objects. COM components and .NET components are a Windows standard way of communicating between software parts. COM has been around for a long time.

Between computers, TCP/IP is a standard way of communicating. But without good documentation of the protocol adding an HTTP layer on top makes it easier to understand. But without good documentation of the protocol RESTful APIs makes it easier to understand. But without good documentation of the protocol WADL...

However I do agree about HTTP. Because I imagine there are more devs that understand HTTP than higher or lower protocols.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#25

Post by aerique »

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…

I'm already pretty happy we're starting to see PL tools that aren't coupled to a specific IDE like f.e. Jedi for Python. Of course an older example of this is ctags.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#26

Post by Avshalom »

anigbrowl wrote: post #8

For the nth time, I encourage people to look at flow-based DSP programming tools like Reaktor and Flowstone (or its earlier incarnation, Synthmaker) where many of these ideas have already been successfully implemented. For the life of me, I can't understand why IDEs don't come with flowchart generation/editing built in by default.

Genetic memories of UML horror stories.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#27

Post by tinco »

tl;dr: Idea 1 is Vim (or any other programming editor). Idea 2 makes no sense, projects have too many symbols for them to be meaningfully encoded in rememberable icons, plus I don't really see how it would condense information. Idea 3 is LabVIEW. Idea 4 is Visual Studio's code map.

These ideas are all basically the first thing anyone comes up with when dreaming up a new IDE.

The big problem of IDEs is that they're a lot of work to make and polish very well. Most developer environments are either in a terminal, to get rid of the hard UI stuff, are an editor with good scriptability, to get rid of the hard IDE stuff, or are backed by huge slow moving corporations.

The one really big innovation that is going to blow life into innovative IDE development is scriptable GUI, aka Javascript+HTML. LightTable isn't the first and isn't going to be the last of awesome new IDE environments for which implementing ideas like this is going to be a piece of cake.

So hold on to your hats, we're definitely going there.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#28

Post by Jormundir »

gagege wrote: post #10
Jormundir wrote: post #9

Here's an idea: the world doesn't need more ideas, just more people implementing, so throwing out ideas as if they're original and have innate value is unhelpful.

Throwing ideas around is almost always helpful. Often when someone points out a solution to a problem or presents a good idea for something new, someone else, who hadn't thought of it themselves, will be inspired and go do the implementation. What's wrong with that?

I think your point makes sense for throwing out specific ideas to specific problems, but I don't think throwing out a general solution (lacking any concrete implementation) to a general problem is going to make someone who is capable of the implementation suddenly realize they overlooked a giant area.

This article can be boiled down to: Project idea: better IDEs.

It's in the same vein as comments like: Business idea: nuclear fusion.

They just aren't productive / valuable.

If say Henry Ford said: Project idea: Use energy from chambered oil combustion with pistons to convert direction of force into a spinning axis to create an horseless vehicle. (I'm obviously not a car expert) Then we would be talking about a valuable idea.

My viewpoint is simple: Ideas are not innately valuable, of all the ideas in the world, only a subset of them are valuable. Obviously you don't know what current ideas will be valuable in the future, but I have a heuristic: for an idea to be valuable, it must be a specific (implementation details included (batteries included)) idea.

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#29

Post by [deleted] »

al2o3cr wrote: post #15
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)

[deleted]

Re: IDEas: Tools for Coders

#30

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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