OT: on IDEs and code writing on steroids

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:gv3ubr$2ul$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>
> Nemerle's interesting, but it has its own issues. The largest one is that 
> it will have to beat history: languages with configurable syntax have 
> failed in droves in the 1970s.
>
> Before I got into D, I was working on Enki. Enki was my own programming 
> language and of course made D look like a piece of crap. In Enki, you had 
> only very few primitives related to macro expansion, and you could 
> construct all language elements - if, while, for, structures, classes, 
> exceptions, you name it, from those primitive elements.
>
> There were two elements that convinced me to quit Enki. One was that I'd 
> got word of a language called IMP72. IMP72 embedded the very same ideas 
> Enki had, with two exceptions: (1) it was created in 1972, and (2) nobody 
> gave a damn ever since. IMP72 (and there were others too around that time) 
> started with essentially one primitive and then generated itself with a 
> bootstrap routine, notion that completely wowed me and I erroneously 
> thought would have the world wowed too.
>

There are many possible reasons for a failed language's failure. One of the 
biggest is lack of visibility. Who has ever heard of IMP72? Sure, that lack 
of visibility could have been because people hated that particular aspect of 
the language, but it could also have been from any one of a number of other 
reasons.

> The second reason was that I've had many coffees and some beers with 
> Walter and he convinced me that configurable syntax is an idea that people 
> just don't like. Thinking a bit more, I realized that humans don't operate 
> well with configurable syntax. To use the hackneyed comparison, no natural 
> language or similar concoction has configurable syntax. Not even musical 
> notation or whatnot. There's one syntax for every human language. I 
> speculated that humans can learn one syntax for a language and then wire 
> their brains to just pattern match semantics using it. Configurable syntax 
> just messes with that approach, and besides makes any program hugely 
> context-dependent and consequently any large program a pile of crap.
>

So I take it AST Macros are no longer on the table for D3?