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

[Sven Panne]

Am Di., 1. Dez. 2020 um 17:59 Uhr schrieb Marian Jancar <
marian.jancar at gmx.com>:

> [...] The correct choice depends on the reader context.
>

I don't think so: The choice mainly depends on the size of the scope where
a name is valid. If you have e.g. a one-line comprehension, I don't see any
point in having a long descriptive name for a name only bound within this
comprehension, it just makes reading harder and more tedious. OTOH, if you
have an API entry point (i.e. a huge/global scope), a longer descriptive
name is far better. And even then: The initial assumption seems to be that
people will pick *good *long names, but this doesn't match with my
experience: People who write incomprehensible code usually pick
incomprehensible/silly/misleading names, too. OTOH, clear, well-structured
code is very readable even with f, g, x, y, ...

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

The fictitious example forces the author to come up with a good *long *name
(which I guess won't work most of the time). How could the IDE come up with
a long name otherwise? I would simply refuse to give a name in a one-liner
comprehension a long name, what for? And shortening long names in a
sensible way doesn't look easy either.

As others have already mentioned before: The idea of having AST editors
instead of text editors comes up again and again for several decades, and
no one has come up with a nice working IDE yet which people actually want
to use in day-to-day work. It's simply hard to beat the efficiency of
people trained in typing text for decades in a text-based editor. The idea
seems to be good enough to produce some research work and/or conference
papers, but not really much more...
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