A comment from the teaching front! Last year we started using the BlueJ teaching environment with our first year Java class (it was interesting to note that by Christmas, most of the second and third year students had started using it too, quite spontaneously).
BlueJ has a rather nice and minimalist editor, more in the cut-and-paste tradition than the vi/emacs tradition, and one that also makes good use of colour. (Well, I think so, and I have noticed that most of the staff now use BlueJ too, partly because of the convenience of the editor and its visual prompts. It's the first time I have really moved away from vi in many years - not that I want to start that battle off!) The BlueJ editor's use of colour certainly does help with noticing when rather more code has been commented out than was intended, although I have to admit that I have never really fathomed out the rules that it uses when allocating colours to different words. I'd suggest taking a look at BlueJ and its use of colour if you want a rather more 'current' exemplar than emacs. David Budgen > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > > But I can't help feeling that, as I infer from Alan's comments, we > > programmers are languishing in a fairly impoverished visual landscape > > when it comes to working with code, perhaps due to the strong ties to > > ASCII and the perceived need to have stuff editable on son-of-vt320, > > and printable by a five-year old LaserJet. > > So ... I know the PPIG list is just here for speculation and > ranting, not really to change anything :-) ... > > BUT, just on the crazy off-chance that anyone is interested in > improving the world - how would we go about fixing the situation? > Ron Baecker and Aaron Marcus's system (which is also nicely > summarised in the chapter "Publishing C Programs" in the MIT > Press software visualisation book), has for many years now been > the only serious attempt to apply typographic expertise to > software. The theoretical perspective of the time was sufficient > for them to look at publication, but not at interaction with > typographic structures - we had to wait for Cognitive Dimensions > to do that. This would be a good time to attempt a decent, > typographically competent, programming editor. > > One of the major obstacles is the "Mr Grumpy" critique. Not so > much "if it ain't broke don't fix it", but rather "it's broke, > but I don't want you to fix it because I want to keep my broken > one". These people will never change their tools, but maybe their > tools will change. Many innovations in source code manipulation > have appeared first in Emacs, and I think we should turn to Emacs > as the most practical research venue. Sadly, it seems we have an > immediate obstacle in the font support built in to Emacs. I > recently wasted a very unhappy day trying to configure Emacs to > change font reliably, and I'm fairly convinced that the font > management is very broken, perhaps needing reimplementing from > scratch. Would it be worth the effort of fixing this as a first > step toward a non-VT100 program editor? > > Alan > -- > Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418 > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) > Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss > Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce > PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
