[Haskell-cafe] Editor OT: streamofconciousness

[John Meacham]

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 06:37:22PM +0800, Michael T. Richter wrote:
>      1. A real GUI environment that takes into account some of the HID
>         advances made in the past 30 years.  (Emacs and Vim don't count,
>         in other words.)

heh. find me a new GUI editor that takes into account the HID advances
that were well established 30 years ago and I will be happy. I am all
for innovation, but not at the cost of needed and useful functionality.

I recently had a discussion with a coworker where he went off for a long
time about his new 'refactoring' editor, telling me cool stuff he could
do with it. Excited and interested, I went to see what it was about (I
always am interested in new stuff, especially if it can make my life
easier). I watched as he used pop-up windows and dialogs to happily
indent and unindent methods and rename variables, after which he turned
to me and said proudly "now this is refactoring.". To which, I, puzzled,
responded, "Really? to me it just looked like you were editing."

It is a perhaps sad fact that a lot of innovation when it comes to
editing interfaces is simply one of terminology. Inventing names for
well established practices, imbuing them with the magical power of
buzzwords to sway opinion in the face of rationality and then dismiss
every feature that one cannot list on a features FAQ as irrelevant.

It is somewhat depressing that immutable pre-packaged macros[1] and the
simple brute-force inclusion of separate tools[2] into the editor are
hailed as innovation, when new innovations, whether they are simple
refinements of old ideas[3], excercises in orthoginality[4], or truely
new research[5] are left to the wayside. But such is the power of the
bullet point.

        John

[1] many (but not all) refactoring features i have seen.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cscope
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28Plan_9%29
[5] http://tlau.org/research/smartedit/


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈