On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 08:47:23 UTC, Boyd wrote:
If you're out for easier code readability, then I'd recommend
not to bother with syntax too much. It'll only get you a slight
readability increase at most, and you'll piss off anyone who
doesn't agree with you, or doesn't want to refactor his code.
I've been experimenting with language design a bit and I found
that a much bigger issue with coding, is that we still use
files and plain text. An IDE where code is represented in a
simple tree and saved in a database, for example, would improve
things dramatically, and no language changes would be necessary.
It wouldn't. When I was working for a SAP consulting company, I
wrote some parts of ABAP, which is stored in the database of the
SAP system itself and only accessible via the build in "IDE". I
would have killed for an decent IDE but there was no way to easy
access the code directly. Programming text are nothing more than
serialized tree data structures stored in a common format.
Actually there was a EMACS plugin for "language-directed" coding,
where the editor knew the code structure and you could only enter
syntactically valid code. Like a "snippet plugin" on steroids.
However the author of the plugin itself admitted that this was a
wrong direction and is back to text editing.
