91–100 of 315 posts
Am I the only one who wants to see multiple, proportional fonts in editors? Sure, I want to keep the methods themselves in monospaced font, but can't I have the method declaration in a larger size, and comments in a proportional serif? There is a wealth of design experience out there in communicating things better and more quickly with typography, so why do we not take advantage of that in our IDEs?
- Smallest unit of code is the function. - Able to get instant feedback on code changes. - Multiple editors with just one function in it. Show code in an "area of concern" not just in a file. - The coding environment can show also results, app windows, graphics, other tools. - Can save the configuration of the above. Smalltalkers have been doing this in commercial projects since the 80's. If only we could have commun…
I immediately thought of Visual Age for Smalltalk when I saw this, but having been done is no reason to not try again.
I hate to be that guy, but where did you get the basis for the colorscheme. It (along with the rest of the editor) is beautiful!
- Smallest unit of code is the function. - Able to get instant feedback on code changes. - Multiple editors with just one function in it. Show code in an "area of concern" not just in a file. - The coding environment can show also results, app windows, graphics, other tools. - Can save the configuration of the above. Smalltalkers have been doing this in commercial projects since the 80's. If only we could have commun…
Of course this comment was inevitable. If Smalltalkers really believe their environment is the right way to code, their attitude should not be one of "we did this first, meh" but instead be "here's what we did right, here's what we did wrong. heed the lessons of history and good luck, you are on a mission from God." I think with the proper care and nurturing, we could be at the beginning of a renaissance where many o…
FYI: One thing Light Table could pick up / learn is the ability to scale as function set grows, to gain a kind of fractal navigability.
EDIT: I should clarify that I like Clojure quite a bit. It just doesn't speak to the kind of programming I do "in anger" right now. So I learn about it and watch ClojureScript more intently because it speaks to the environment I've chosen for my products/projects.
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.
For as useful as sites like stackoverflow are for sharing knowledge, it is potentially encouraging a generation of copy/paste coders who's job it is to find and glue snippets together until they get the desired outcome.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm starting think some knowledge needs to be earned. [get off my lawn].
If you aren't comfortable slinging files and directories around, you probably aren't a very productive software developer.
As far as ide's go, this concept is definitely intriguing. But I believe putting too much faith in abstractions like what is implied by being function focused(there is no "file") rather than file focused(these are your "files") has the potential of blowing up in your face. I think you need both.
Anyone who had to code on a team using VB6 remembers the pain of *.frx files and how they needed to be version controlled, but you didn't need to worry about them because it was an implementation detail required by the ide. UNTIL, 2 people made visual edits to the same screen and then the project wouldn't open. GOOD TIMES.
Mind if I share a couple ideas that might not be hard to implement with what you've got?
1) It would be nice to see \aggregate information about what has happened in function calls. The simplest would be: while the code is running, put and update a bar graph next to each function to show, proportionally to others, how many times it has been called so far.
2) More generally: record and associate with a function \all the inputs and outputs it has had. (Other commenters talked about having "context"). Then the programmer can scroll through these lists, calculate statistics for them if they are numbers, or choose one of them to plug into the function. (Often when you are refactoring code, some function lower in the code path gets 'orphaned'----it took some kind of complex input you don't want to bother putting in by hand, and so now if you want to modify it you're deterred. If you had prior inputs, you could just 'wire it up' with one of those.)
3) Commenters talked about having different fonts. I think the \one area where this would be helpful in Lisp is with the parentheses. I've shared prior versions of this idea before, but what I think would be helpful is to vary both \color and \size of parentheses. You pick three or four colors, say red, blue, and black (more than that is hard to tell apart in context, especially with syntax coloring), and once you've varied that, you bump the size up. So if you had seven parentheses in sequence, there would be three sizes, with the outermost three the largest, the next three medium, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I can think of a few reasons, though they may not be the ones he has in mind. There's the fact that you're dealing with cell references rather than variable names, so all of your expressions look like ($K4 - $S$1) rather than (principal - payment). There's the fact that the IDE you're working in is trash -- rather than a text file with carefully indented parenthetical statements, it's a single line text field. Sort o…
Numbers.app has the nice feature (among others) to use column/row headers to name cells/colums/rows in formulas in a readable manner.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Editing complex functions in a spreadsheet is an absolute nightmare Can you expand on why? Also, if you can imagine a spreadsheet that actually did a good job of this, what would it look like?
I can think of a few reasons, though they may not be the ones he has in mind. There's the fact that you're dealing with cell references rather than variable names, so all of your expressions look like ($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 o…
I hate to be that guy, but where did you get the basis for the colorscheme. It (along with the rest of the editor) is beautiful!
Looks kind of like http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
IE: Very, very neat.
As a Ruby/Objective-C developer, I've always wanted something like this for my ruby projects. Xcode is awesome, but this level of integration for our distributed projects would make things go so much faster. I cannot wait to use it :)