Exceptional coding style

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2013-01-16 at 00:57 +0100, Rob T wrote:
[…]
> The sad part is that after all these decades, we're still 
> _writing_ code, and we're doing it in essentially the exact same 
> way as was done 30 years ago using a text editor.

In the early to mid 1980s there was a move to not using text files but
using AST with meta-data as the stored form of code. Not just the syntax
oriented editing people but people doing for C, Fortran, etc. what
Smalltalk did for Smalltalk, treat the text form of the code as a
rendering of the stored form.

Sadly two things stopped this from becoming the norm: a. hardware wasn't
up to the job required (whereas now it is the other way round); b.
programmers refused to give up files containing text as the stored form.

Now look at people not still using Emacs and VIM: IDEs everywhere. What
do IDEs spend most of their time doing? Reconstructing ASTs on the fly
in order to provide all the help and code completion programmers now
claim is their inalienable right.

> For whatever reason, no other means of constructing software 
> programs has really taken off, and I have to wonder why.

It would have done if programmers had been less conservative and more
willing to be open to change. But no, text files had to be the right
medium of storage. Bah.

In the next round of funding in Europe, there are various project
proposals to revisit the whole 1980s way of thinking about code
development and code development environments. Replace text file as the
stored form with a representation of the AST with meta-data. Allow IDEs
like Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans not to have to infer ASTs in
parallel to compiling code. Reclaim some memory and machine cycles by
getting IDEs right.

(Emacs|VIM|GEdit|Sublime Text|.*) your days really ought to be numbered.
We the programmers demand development tools that are modern and up to
date. Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans are legacy as well.

There is an analogy: actor model, CSP, dataflow were all invented in the
1960s and 1970s but studiously ignored by programmers in favour of
"close to the metal" shared-memory multi-threading because parallelism
was about performance and you have to wring every cycle.  Bah. Mere
infrastructure. Now any programmer who isn't using dataflow, CSP or
actors for concurrency and parallelism is legacy. Look at D ;-)

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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