Yeah, I was going to mention Smalltalk too, as one of the languages NOT using plain text to store programs — which led to a very strong boundary between ST and other world, not doing any favors to the first.
The idea of using some non-plaintext-based format to store programs appeared lots of times, without any significant achivements. And I think one of the main reasons for that is that it makes interacting with other tools extremely difficult. Not just with pre-existing tools. Even if grep didn't exist, it would be very easy to hack something like it if you need to search your codebase for a specific word; you don't need any complex APIs to read plain text files, there are just two functions — one to read a line of code, and another one to check for eof. Similarly, it's easy to generate your Java files with a Perl script — with Perl itself not knowing anything about Java. Text has the advantage of being SIMPLE — and the vague idea of "embedding a spreadsheet in your code" (what the hell for?) doesn't come close to beating it. And you know what? You don't really need to give up text-based storage to have graphic capabilities. Windows resources files (.rc) are text-based, and there are plenty of visual editors for them, including one in Visual Studio; and, thankfully, it still produces the same old text-based file — and sometimes it's very desirable to look into one, for example, if you want to know which control is tagged with this ID. Отправлено с iPad 22.10.2011, в 21:06, "Claus Reinke" <claus.rei...@talk21.com> написал(а): >> The world needs programmers to accept and take seriously Greg Wilson's >> extensible programming, and stop laughing it off as "lolwut wysiwyg msword >> for programming", and start implementing it. >> http://third-bit.com/blog/archives/4302.html > > Who is "the world"? For starters, I don't think it is Greg Wilson's > idea, and if you look for alternate sources, often under other titles, you'll > find parts of it implemented, with varying degrees of success > and often little acceptance. The idea is much older than one might think - > conferences on extensible languages were held around 1970. > Early implementation approximations didn't have the disposable computing > power of today's PCs, nor did early implementers find > an audience ready for their ideas (to feed their students or themselves, some > of those who were such ahead of the curve had to switch to working on more > conventional, funded, topics). > > Useful search keys: > > - extensible languages (as in AI, the meaning of "extensible" tends > to be redefined whenever a problem gets solved, so many features > that used to mark an extensible language in the past have now > become standard) > > - structure editors (in that they were forerunners of projectional > IDEs, and exhibited some of their advantages and disadvantages; > there have been many efforts to generate structure editors from language > descriptions) > > - projectional language workbenches (instead of parsing source > to AST, the IDE/workbench operates on an AST-like abstract > model, and source code views are just projections of that; makes it > easier to embed sublanguages); > > Smalltalkers will probably claim their image-based IDEs have > been doing that all along. > > - hyper-programming (where persistent runtime data can be embedded in code > via linking, similar to hypertext, with > generic editors instead of generic Read/Show) > > - Banana Algebra: Syntactic Language Extension via an Algebra of Languages > and Transformations (one example of research > on language composition) > > IDE generators, IDE tooling for domain-specific languages, language-oriented > programming, language workbenches, ... they all contribute to the now broader > interest in the topic. > > In the context of Haskell, there once was Keith Hanna's > document-centered programming: > > http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/vital/ > http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/pivotal/ > > Perhaps Keith's projects can serve as an inspiration to just start hacking?-) > The subject is an instance of these quotes: > > "The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed." > William Gibson > > "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." > Alan Kay > > Claus > http://clausreinke.github.com/ > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
