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My second wish may seem like it is missing one of the main, most beneficial features. But the other features are enough, such as " Multiple editors with just one function in it." or "Show code in an area of concern"
I like it. I'd not be surprised if someone comes up with vim and emacs version any time near soon.
For example, getting documentation is just as easy. (Actually, I don't know if you can search by docstring, but otherwise it's the same.) You can also get the same experience as having functions rather than files open by having a lot of little "windows" (in the Emacs sense) with a function in each. Since you can have multiple "windows" open on a single buffer, it can work for functions in different parts of the same file as well.
In short: Emacs has all the building blocks you need (as always) and some of the features are already easy to replicate. Building something like this on top of Emacs just makes sense.
This is a great idea. I can almost see my development time going down by a big factor and writing much more robust programs. I wonder, how hard it would be to do this in existing editors ?
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Editing complex functions in a spreadsheet is an absolute nightmare though. AS long as he doesn't recreate that part we are good :)
Editing complex functions in a spreadsheet is an absolute nightmare Can you expand on why? Also, if you can imagine a spreadsheet that actually did a good job of this, what would it look like?
There's the fact that you're dealing with cell references rather than variable names, so all of your expressions look like ($K4 - $S$1) rather than (principal - payment).
There's the fact that the IDE you're working in is trash -- rather than a text file with carefully indented parenthetical statements, it's a single line text field. Sort of like trying to code in a URL bar.
There's the fact that pieces of a program are often littered all over the spreadsheet, and it's hard to look at the whole thing at once.
There's the fact that it's extremely stateful -- the whole thing exists and depends on a table of values -- and when and where and how and in what order they're updated. From a programming perspective, everything is a global variable, and anything can update anything, and setting the state of those global variables is the only way for functions to return data or talk to each other.
I would say all of these are problems that Real Programming Languages have under control, so I can't say I worry too much about such an IDE descending into spreadsheet madness. I do wonder how you would show meaningful realtime results, though, without running a program from the top.
I can't get my hands on this soon enough. It makes so much sense: we're moving away from the files and folders metaphor everywhere, so why not in the IDE too?
We might not want the hassle of dealing with files and folders all the time, but I sometimes worry that a new generation of "programmers" will emerge who have no understanding of how the underlying filesystem works.
A significant portion of this generation doesn't understand CPUs and buses. They wouldn't have been able to write anything remotely complex 20 years ago). That doesn't seem to be hindering things much, though. There are still system programmers out there who dive into it, but our abstractions have gotten good enough that all programmers don't need to understand the details to be successful.
(FWIW, I am conflicted on this topic. I wrote a little more here[1].)
Isn't it ironic that this is posted on a site that does startup funding and the comments are "please put this on kickstarter" not "please apply for Y Combinator"? Is it possible that Kickstarter will disrupt Y combinator style startup funding? If we (the consumers) can bypass the investors and pay for what we want, why do we need the startup gatekeepers? Obviously this wouldn't work for all startups but a large porti…
(More or less, I'm not saying it's black and white)
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why not name names? seems like it could be informative.
Not in this thread. This is Light Table's moment to shine, don't want to clog it up with such a derail.
What other sticking points are there?