On Fri, 2015-03-06 at 15:22 -0500, Ben Boeckel via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: […] > > Well it is now more apparent with more quoting. It now appears that the > first block is using 3-space indents while the bottom looks just fine > even with the quote markers.
But there is no semantic difference in the code and it is all being replaced anyway. I think the fact that a codebase should have a formatter run over any change before being committed, to enforce the rules of the codebase, will get round the issue anyway. Pythons pep-8, gofmt, dfmt,… the use of such a tool, enforcing the standard of the codebase is a good thing. […] > Well, when that means you're going to have absurdly long lines to deal > with in anything other than your definition "real" editors (and I've > never seen one which fits your definition). Such editors were being researched and created in the 1980s but computers were a bit too slow for the necessary infrastructure and, more importantly, a vocal section of the development community screamed, these things are wasteful of resources, and we must have ASCII encoded files as the storage of our code. This attitude has, in my view, been the biggest stumbling block to progress in software development for the last 30 years. Now with suitably fast processors and graphics, we are seeing all the technology of the 1980s reentering the arena, but instead of doing it right, IDEs are having to spend huge resources continually reconstructing AST data from the flat file input. Some of them do it better than others, but if only it had been accepted that AST is the correct unit of editing in the 1980s we would be a lot further forward today. > > I really dislike the Go obsession with block style alignment of > > declarations. > > I won't say I'm a fan of it indiscriminently, but if it's that or > 200+-character lines, I'll chop argument lists up a bit to fit something > more reasonable. There is more than one way of chopping things up, and even aligning them. Stepping away from monospace fonts, and the obsession with 2D rendering of 1D data, gives a different view on chopping up which ends up no better, but no worse. […] > > And I find that monospace fonts tend to make it much easier to tell the > difference between 'l', '1', and 'I'. Not so important in English, but > it can be all the difference in code. Important point. Fonts are context dependent. A font for easy reading of plain English novels, may not be appropriate for other uses exactly because the different uses and contexts of the characters mean the glyphs must have different relationships. But this is a font design thing and monospace versus proportional is not the major determinant. > > In a real editor there is no hard line break, no need for this form of > > indentation. Should a line be too long for the rendering area either > > viewport or syntax directed soft line wrap are used. Having overflow is > > mixing content with rendering. > > You're making assumptions about the features of your users' editors. > These features are not trivial to implement and this basically requires > things like pygments and other tools used to render code to the web with > all kinds of logic to handle dynamic viewports of the shown code. IMO, > it is even worse than putting #vim:, #kate:, or emacs formatting > directives in your code since it is implicit. > > Personally, I use Vim because it works similarly for all uses. I don't > know what I'd do if I had to work with a different editor for each > language I work with. I do not disagree. The problem is that Emacs, VIM, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans, are editors based fundamentally on a 1970s view of editing and resources and the world has changed. Fortunately, I am hearing that some of the ideas of the SOE and AST editors of the 1980s are being re-raised, now with the resources to deal with it. Should this go forward, I can see VIM dying, Emacs dying or being rewritten, and IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans, etc. losing at least half their code or more. The IDEs with all their "refactoring support" are almost reproducing what comes for free with SOE and AST focused editors. As actors, dataflow, CSP were rejected by programmers in the 1970s and 1980s because they had processes and threads and really enjoyed shared-memory multi-threaded programming (*), SOE and AST based editors of the 1980s are effectively being recreated by the IDEs of the 2010s. They are hamstrung by the continued obsession with the text file as the primary unit of editing. As soon as they and programmer users get over this, the sooner we can get on with better UX for development. (**) (*) OK so operating system developers are allowed to do this stuff because they have to, but applications people should not be doing any such thing. (**) And yes the very foundation of version control will have to change as well. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:[email protected] 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected] London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
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