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Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

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Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#3
Sikuli is also based on a similar idea and is written in Python. I am guessing it boils down to preference, but writing code as it is written now involves a lot less 'mouse' and much more keyboard, which most developers, me included, take for granted. I do agree that currently code written has very high limitations on re-usability, primarily because code is written with a specific project in mind. I believe two things can be done to make it more re-usable: 1) either have all developers write code with the idea in mind that they are writing independent libraries and not code for part of a bigger project so the code becomes much much more modular and decoupled and can be used in other projects on the fly. 2) create an extension which creates a project specific visual map for the code, which would in turn allow other developers to pick and choose code to their liking while having a greater understanding of how the code actually works. This being said, the author's efforts are much commendable.

Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#4

Sikuli is also based on a similar idea and is written in Python. I am guessing it boils down to preference, but writing code as it is written now involves a lot less 'mouse' and much more keyboard, which most developers, me included, take for granted. I do agree that currently code written has very high limitations on re-usability, primarily because code is written with a specific project in mind. I believe two thing…

This indeed is commendable. There are more possibilities than what he has touched so far.

He could add automatically reloading live code, and link the testing suite... You see a bug, correct it, and the test suite runs continuously at the spots where the code is compilable, giving feedback per code fragment.

Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#5
Author here. I was just about to go sleep when I noticed a retweet and a lot of new stars on Conception; this explains it.

The linked C++ project was the result of an initial year of working on it, which culminated in a winning entry to LIVE 2013 contest [1] and me switching to working on a version of it written completely in Go [2]. I no longer work actively on the C++ version, but I do on the Go one [3].

Primarily, it has been an extremely insightful learning experience. I had a lot of ideas and I wanted to try them, and by building Conception I found out the reasons why certain things that are commonly desired do not actually work well in practice, and why our seemingly outdated practices of writing code no different than decades ago are still so predominant and effective.

It's really interesting to go back to my old notes and goals and, with hindsight, truly understand _why_ they didn't work out, and what it would take to make them work.

The Go version is go-gettable and working [4] despite having lots of dependences (as proven by the green Travis build). This is one of the benefits of using Go and not the case for C++ version. You can easily try it, but at this point the UI is so far from finished, it's not really fit for general use. If you're interested, I highly recommend watching the repo so you'll see further development. :)

[1] http://liveprogramming.github.io/liveblog/2013/04/live-progr...

[2] https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go

[3] https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go/graphs/contributor...

[4] https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception-go#installation

Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#6
Why should being written in a particular language matter? We see a lot of these “written in Go”s these days for a lot of new softwares. I’m a big user of Go myself. Love the language and use it for almost everything. But I just don’t get why an editor or IDE or static site generator or any other piece of software brag about using a particular language or library.

Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#7
post #5

Author here. I was just about to go sleep when I noticed a retweet and a lot of new stars on Conception; this explains it. The linked C++ project was the result of an initial year of working on it, which culminated in a winning entry to LIVE 2013 contest [1] and me switching to working on a version of it written completely in Go [2]. I no longer work actively on the C++ version, but I do on the Go one [3]. Primarily,…

  It's really interesting to go back to my old notes and 
  goals and, with hindsight, truly understand _why_ they 
  didn't work out, and what it would take to make them work.
It would be awesome if you could blog about it or share your notes!

Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#8
post #7
post #5

Author here. I was just about to go sleep when I noticed a retweet and a lot of new stars on Conception; this explains it. The linked C++ project was the result of an initial year of working on it, which culminated in a winning entry to LIVE 2013 contest [1] and me switching to working on a version of it written completely in Go [2]. I no longer work actively on the C++ version, but I do on the Go one [3]. Primarily,…

It's really interesting to go back to my old notes and goals and, with hindsight, truly understand _why_ they didn't work out, and what it would take to make them work. It would be awesome if you could blog about it or share your notes!

I agree, that would be useful, if not the most useful thing I could do, so that my findings aren't in vain.

Sadly, I don't do any blogging, but I'll see if I can do something about that.

Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#9
post #5

Author here. I was just about to go sleep when I noticed a retweet and a lot of new stars on Conception; this explains it. The linked C++ project was the result of an initial year of working on it, which culminated in a winning entry to LIVE 2013 contest [1] and me switching to working on a version of it written completely in Go [2]. I no longer work actively on the C++ version, but I do on the Go one [3]. Primarily,…

Very interesting concept explorarion. Nice work.

Re: Conception – An experimental modern IDE written in Go

#10
post #5

Author here. I was just about to go sleep when I noticed a retweet and a lot of new stars on Conception; this explains it. The linked C++ project was the result of an initial year of working on it, which culminated in a winning entry to LIVE 2013 contest [1] and me switching to working on a version of it written completely in Go [2]. I no longer work actively on the C++ version, but I do on the Go one [3]. Primarily,…

Developers who re-invent/re-imagine some wheels usually realize at the end why the original wheels are designed like those. We, understandably, don't quite appreciate the work other people have done, where we consider their tradeoffs as mistakes. But when we do them ourselves, we eventually see the huge amount of conflicting goals, as tradeoff is the essence of engineering, or anything.

However, almost all the good new things came from some re-invention. Don't let the tradeoff scare you away from your original ideas. Maybe the whole interface doesn't beat what we have now, but there are quite a few very good stuff in your demo. And I believe some of them (zoomable overviews, widgets), can truly work better than what we have now. It somehow reminds me of Rob Pike's Acme editor, though they look very different.

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