[Haskell-cafe] What features should an (fictitious) IDE for Haskell have?

Marian Jancar marian.jancar at gmx.com
Tue Dec 1 16:57:47 UTC 2020


Some time ago there was a thread about an article where the author
advocated for extremely long and descriptive variable names.
Discussion spread if that is the right approach and what is the best
variable name length and descriptiveness.

The correct choice depends on the reader context.

The article author works as a contractor.
He reads a lot of code for the first time.
Long and descriptive variable names help him a lot.

For someone else, well acquainted with the code, are such long names
only a clutter that reduces readability.
They might prefer single letter variable names, or pointfree style.

So each of them goes and adjusts the variable name descriptiveness
slider in the fictitious IDE aproppriately.

The todays text-as-the-primary-representation approach however forces
the author to make a pick already when writing the code.

On 12/1/20 2:06 AM, Mig Mit wrote:
> Please DO store code as ascii text. At the very least that would allow
> the use of external tools — sed, diff, git, whatever. Non-ascii
> representations were tried multiple times, and largely failed, in
> particular because of terrible interaction with other tools.
>
> Also, please make sure your IDE is a good text editor. Because that's
> what the code is — not AST, but text. Until it is finished (to a certain
> lax definition of "finished") it is likely to not even be representable
> in AST form.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On 2020. Dec 1., at 2:02, MarLinn <monkleyon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>
>> Most importantly: A good IDE is not a text editor, but an AST editor.
>> If the AST happens to be presented as text, that's a choice of
>> visualisation, nothing more. Better to start with a graph-like
>> visualisation to free the mind, then think through the possible
>> interactions. Maybe add the typical text-like visualisation later. But
>> don't start there or you'll just re-invent notepad for the nth time.
>>
>> Maybe don't even /store/ the code as ascii text.
>>
>>
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