On Sunday, 12 May 2013 at 18:42:22 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
On Sunday, 12 May 2013 at 18:09:59 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I think that is irrelevant to my point. A language doesn't
have to be text based.
Textual format have proven theur usefullness again and again.
Programming languages, json, xml, even dark stuff like LLVM IR
have a textual representation. This is easier to debug.
In that regard, if you consider IntelliJ, java has become a
textual representation. It is important as the compiler would
be much harder to create otherwize.
Languages have been stored textually yes, and that is clearly
beneficial, but editing code even in fairly basic editors is far
beyond simple text editing.
Automatic indentation, symbol selection, symbol renaming, symbol
navigation, code folding, auto-completion, quick info,
intellisense, syntax highlighting, etc. mean that editing code is
far closer to editing a complex tree-like data structure than
editing text, even displaying it is not the same, and that's how
it should be for maximum productivity. Conceptually we think
about code in a way much closer to an AST than a bunch of lines
of text.
Joke or not, I would amend "real programmers use notepad" to
"real programmers *should be able* to use notepad".
