Show HN: An IDE for poets

    All night we hack,
    And sleep we lack.
    We eat junk food,
    The code is crude. 
    Nevertheless,
    Friends are impressed,
    When in the morning,
    Our post on HN* is roaring!

  Delete not this post for fear of shame
  for written here is the poster's name
  And when he's dead his ghost will come and say
  Why did you delete my post anyway?

  I thought I'd continue my work
  But HN gets in my way
  And now I found another toy
  To replace my work with play
  
  Damn you HN, what have you done?
  Always getting in my way
  Someday I'll get you back and more
  Then you will feel dismay

I always get a special joy from seeing things like this. This is something I would never have thought of. It fills such an obvious hole in hindsight. It opens up a place where folk can suddenly experiment and play with something that they might have been afraid of previously. It opens things up.

This reminds me of when I helped out with some teacher training in my teens waaaaay back in 1986/87. We were showing some primary school teachers and primary school kids their first computers. Some simple paint programs. Some simple word processors. This is a mouse. Etc.

I remember this one eight or nine year old loving the delete key in the word processor "I can make the mistakes go away" he said.

We left some of the kids messing about with the machines as we talked to the teachers. 30m later that kid came back to drag us over to see this couple of hundred word story that he'd tapped out. The teacher said that, if she hadn't seen it herself, she wouldn't have believed the kid could have produced it. Grammar, spelling, plot, etc. were worlds above his normal standard.

Because he could make the mistakes go away.

The look on that lads face as he took that story away with him (we printed it out for him) still brings tears to the eye of this cynical old bastard.

I've always bit really terrible at poetry. I played with this for 30m.

Bravo.

Interesting idea though.