OT: on IDEs and code writing on steroids

[Walter Bright]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> In the Good Old Days (when it was usual for an average programmer to 
> write parts of the code in ASM (that was the time before the late 
> eighties -- be it Basic, Pascal, or even C, some parts had to be done in 
> ASM to help a bearable user experience when the mainframes had less 
> power than today's MP3 players), the ASM programing was very different 
> on, say, Zilog, MOS, or Motorola processors. The rumor was that the 6502 
> was made for hand coded ASM, whereas the 8088 was more geared towards 
> automatic code generation (as in C commpilers, etc.). My experiences of 
> both certainly seemed to support this.

The 6502 is an 8 bit processor, the 8088 is 16 bits. All 8 bit 
processors were a terrible fit for C, which was designed for 16 bit 
CPUs. Everyone who coded professional apps for the 6502, 6800, 8080 and 
Z80 (all 8 bit CPUs) wrote in assembler. (Including myself.)


> If we were smart with D, we'd find out a way of leapfrogging this 
> thinking. We have a language that's more powerful than any of C#, Java 
> or C++, more practical than Haskell, Scheme, Ruby, &co, and more 
> maintainable than C or Perl, but which *still* is Human Writable. All we 
> need is some outside-of-the-box thinking, and we might reap some 
> overwhelming advantages when we combine *this* language with the IDEs 
> and the horsepower that the modern drone takes for granted.
> 
> Easier parsing, CTFE, actually usable templates, practical mixins, pure 
> functions, safe code, you name it! We have all the bits and pieces to 
> really make writing + IDE assisted program authoring, a superior reality.

Right, but I can't think of any IDE feature that would be a bad fit for 
using the filesystem to store the D source modules.