OT: on IDEs and code writing on steroids

[Georg Wrede]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.)

Sloppy me, 8080 was what I meant, instead of the 8088. My bad.

And you're right about ASM coding. But over here, with smaller software 
companies, stuff was done win S-Basic (does anyone even know that one 
anymore???), C-Basic, and Turbo Pascal. Ron Cain's SmallC wasn't really 
up to anything serious, and C wasn't all that well known around here 
then. But Turbo Pascal was already at 3.0 in 1985, and a good 
investment, because using it was the same on the pre-PC computers and 
the then new IBM-PC.

>> 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.

I remember writing something about it here, like 7 years ago. But today 
there are others who have newer opinions about it. I haven't thought 
about it since then.

I wonder how a seasoned template author would describe what the most 
welcome help would be when writing serious templates?