IDEas: Tools for Coders

Oh! You just noticed that IDEs suck? Where have you been living, under a rock?

Computer programmers are one of the most dismal professionals on that planet. How many so called programmers/coders can even write a simple parser or a compiler? Less than one percent I suspect. I should know because I am one of them. After dabbling away with Aho and Ullman somewhere in the 80s or 90s I haven't approached the subject since.

Ever since Smalltalk came out it has been downhill all the way, and it is only now a lot of the current IDEs have caught up with it and in the last few years have begun to extend the concept.

I believe that:

1. Learning to understand and write parsers and interpreters should be one of the first things taught in computer science even before the whole gamut of data structures and algorithms have been studied.

2. Being able to develop IDEs should part of every computer science course. They may even be developed to help illustrate the data structures and algorithms mentioned above. Unlike most professions computer scientists are the ones most capable of building the tools for creating, analyzing and illustrating their work, so why are they the ones that as far as we can tell use the shittiest tools available to most professions? Honestly I blame Sun and IBM for this. The moment Java came out everything went down hill. Then the web came, then 'scripting' , then everybody decided that they could and should 'build' everything using Notepad, VIM or Textmate.

3. The tools are there, Smalltalk guys have been using and developing their own tools for ages, only the targetted graphical environments have been split up and the OS owners, Microsoft in particular keeps blowing hot and cold as to which one system developers should target. IDE and graphical tools development is so interactive that the idea of using traditional compiled languages to develop them is simply absurd unless you use very fast compilers and computers. It is time they went 3D as well may be using some Blender, Unity3D or some other gaming toolkit to bring them up to date. 2D text and graphics are boring.

4. The bottom line is IDEs should be something developers ought to create or collaborate to create themselves. The big corporations should stay out of that, ie the decisions shouldn't be commercial decisions. It seems that a sad immaturity of computer programming as a profession has led to development tools being dictated by clueless profit seeking corporate bosses. They should be the decisions of developers guilds which should not be linked with corporate interests of any kind. You know what you want, just do it yourselves.

5. What else? Yeah, get your parsing skills together, and don't develop it in Javascript unless you plan to develop your own version of Typescript or Dart later on when subtle bugs begin to creep into your cherished IDE.

PS. Sorry for the trolling at the top. I just couldn't help myself.

Http is a protocol we use to communicate between systems, that is true, but not the parts of software. For example, to print "Hello World" on the screen, we use a sub-routine like WriteLine. The standard we use to communicate between software sub-systems, in this case, is a function with parameters. So, WriteLine ("Hello World") pushes the text "Hello World" into the sub-routine WriteLine.

Parameters are, for basically all languages, the means by which information is communicated between sub-systems.

The thing is, it is really hard to standardize the communication between sub-systems because sub-routines can vary widely in how they are defined (the possible combination of parameters and types is quite high). In fact, you can end up with thousands of different sub-routines: even in the same program. Each one unique and thus "non-standard".

This is the problem we need to crack. How do we create frameworks that don't lead to thousands of specialized interfaces: each one making the framework that much harder to use.

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

Indeed.

Use of icons was one of the topics in an April fools' joke from Bjarne Stroustrup [1, 2].

[1] http://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

[2] https://www.cct.lsu.edu/~hkaiser/spring_2012/exercises/week6...

I guess someone could make a platform for plugins then also provide a translation plugin for IntelliJ, Eclipse, Emacs, Vim, VS etc. So they can all use the same plugins.

Sure, why not? Worked really well for E-mail.

Actually, if that's a route worth taking I'd rather see LaTex than HTML.

Or just Markdown.