[Haskell-cafe] Refactoring status

[Peter Verswyvelen]

> Yes - I think you're wrong. I've seen non-textual editors for
> programming languages, and they are severely unpleasant for all but
> the most new beginners and restricted tasks.

For programmers and mathematicians, you are absolutely right. For beginners
and people who have highly developed visual skills (like computer graphic
artists), I'm afraid you are wrong. Most of the latter would never even try
to look at something like Haskell, while many of them are actually using a
(subset of) a dataflow or functional language (Apple's Shake, SideFX
Houdini, Digital Fusion, the Unreal 3 Game Engine, the Spirops AI system,
just to name a few). Most of these application also provide a textual
interface, but artists mostly prefer the graphical view.

> There is a good chance that you can derive graphical views of source
> code (call flow graphs, module dependencies etc) which perhaps could
> be used to modify one particular sort of information in the code.
> Other than that, I'd say text is going to remain the way forward.

But now everybody is developing their own parsers and structured data
representation for Haskell tools no, because text is the standard? 

Cheers,
Peter