DConf 2013 keynote

Diggory diggsey at googlemail.com
Sun May 12 12:11:33 PDT 2013


On Sunday, 12 May 2013 at 18:42:22 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Sunday, 12 May 2013 at 18:09:59 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> I think that is irrelevant to my point. A language doesn't 
>> have to be text based.
>
> Textual format have proven theur usefullness again and again. 
> Programming languages, json, xml, even dark stuff like LLVM IR 
> have a textual representation. This is easier to debug.
>
> In that regard, if you consider IntelliJ, java has become a 
> textual representation. It is important as the compiler would 
> be much harder to create otherwize.

Languages have been stored textually yes, and that is clearly 
beneficial, but editing code even in fairly basic editors is far 
beyond simple text editing.

Automatic indentation, symbol selection, symbol renaming, symbol 
navigation, code folding, auto-completion, quick info, 
intellisense, syntax highlighting, etc. mean that editing code is 
far closer to editing a complex tree-like data structure than 
editing text, even displaying it is not the same, and that's how 
it should be for maximum productivity. Conceptually we think 
about code in a way much closer to an AST than a bunch of lines 
of text.

Joke or not, I would amend "real programmers use notepad" to 
"real programmers *should be able* to use notepad".


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