Falling in love with D, but...

[Knud Soerensen]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:26:40 +0000, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:

> The more I read about D, the more I fall in love with it. It contains almost everything I ever wanted to
> see in a programming language, and I've been coding for 25 years now: from 6502 assembler to C/C+
> + (Zortech! ;-), C#, a bit of Java, Scheme and Prolog, SQL, and "Logix" - an inhouse visual mostly
> functional language which my team created for videogame designers/artists. Logix was used to create
> some special effects and mini-games on Playstation 3. It was amazing to see that artists with no
> programming skills could create incredible stuff given the right visuals / notation...
> 
> Anyway, D looks really great, but I'm spoiled with todays popular RAD tools such as integrated
> debugging, edit-and-continue, code completion, parameter tooltips, refactoring, fast navigation, call
> graphs, builtin version control, etc... as found in e.g. Visual Studio 2005 + Resharper 2.5 or Eclipse/
> IntelliJ IDEA. It's also handy to have a huge standard framework such as DOTNET or J2SE/EE, or even
> STL/boost. It's not really necessary: my first videogames did not use any code from the OS, it was 100%
> pure self written assembly code directly talking to the hardware, but that was a century ago ;-)
> 
> So as soon as I want to get started with D I find myself stuck (also because of my RSI... I just refuse to
> type a symbol all over again ;-). It is as if I got this brand new car engine that looks to outperform all
> others, but I can't find the correct tires, suspension, etc. Frustrating.
> 
> One thing I don't like about current IDEs: they still work on the text level, which is horrible for
> refactoring in a team (think extreme programming). For example renaming a symbol should be one
> change under version control, but it currently means that all source files refering to the symbol (by
> name!) must be modified, potentially giving a lot of merge conflicts and co-workers shouting not to
> rename a symbol anymore, just leave the bad names... The advantage of a pure drag-drop-connect-
> the-dots visual programming language like Logix is that it can work very close to the AST, directly
> linking to statements/functions by "pointer/identifier", so a symbolname never matters for the
> computer, only for a human, and a rename is just one modification to the symbol and not to its
> references. Of course we programmers don't want to work with visual graphs (screen clutter!), we want
> to see code, but I think we might also benefit from writing code closer to the AST; after all, code
> completion and all those handy code snippets are a bit like that: you insert a foreach loop using a
> single keystroke, and fill in the symbols, but its still just text. Why not insert a foreach statetement in a
> high-level AST, and regard the text as a representation/tagged navigation of the (high level) AST,
> instead of translating the text into the AST... I heared some old LISP editors worked like that, but I never
> saw one.
> 
> So maybe it would be a good idea to develop and IDE just as (r)evolutionary as D is? Or does it already
> exist, meaning I just wasted half an hour typing this email ;-)
> 
> Keep up the amazing work,
> Peter

Take a look at this project http://www.dsource.org/projects/codeanalyzer