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.
What you've described is almost exactly what I kind-of came up
with on my own too. If I had time, I'd work on such a concept to
see whether it actually works in practice, but I don't see any
good reason why it wouldn't. The only issue is that it would
require more of a time investment to get started (working on a
compiler is hard enough... but requiring a custom IDE to go with
it? Ouch).
I've got a few more ideas but they're crazy enough that I
wouldn't feel comfortable talking about them prior to actually
testing the ideas out to see if it works well.
