OT: on IDEs and code writing on steroids

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 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.

As I said, there were many languages with configurable syntax created 
during that period. None was even remembered. But then, correlation is 
not causation :o).

>> 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?

AST macros can be implemented to not allow configurable syntax.


Andrei