Re: [shlomif-beta-reviewers] Re: Message 3 (Re: About Park - points to consider when designing a new programming language)

On Sat, 2006-06-24 at 11:27 +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:

> > > I believe most one liners assume the programmer has a ready, instant,
> > > knowledge of most of the core functions and concepts he needs to write
> > > stuff.
> >
> > A properly-designed IDE with a properly-designed search engine and
> > properly-catalogued Internet-based database of documentation and code
> > examples - would extend the effective "ready, instant knowledge" used by
> > the programmer.
> 
> Possibly. However, many (most ?) programs will just fire-up vim, joe, edit.exe 
> or their different idea of a lightweight and convenient command line editor 
> to write the script (or edit it directly in the shell prompt), if a one-liner 
> is all they want to write.

The search engine can be available in a separate window, say inside a
Web browser.  It would be open all the time.

> When I said "ready, instant knowledge" I meant knowledge that you do not have 
> to lookup. For example, when programming Perl, I already know the syntax for 
> regular expressions, most of the useful functions out of perlfunc, the 
> operators that I need, etc. Some people know it for Python or Ruby or PHP or 
> a different language. Part of the reason I'm still using Perl for my scripts 
> is that looking everything up for a different language would be more time 
> consuming, so even if the resultant script would be shorter, it would take me 
> longer to write.

Limiting the tools used to write one-liners limits the power of one's
one-liners.  My suggestion is about expanding the scope of tools
immediately available for this.  Especially, example code fragments will
be very useful for writing one-liners in a language which is not being
frequently used.  And this is very good when a different than usual
language needs to be used due to better match of its paradigms and the
problem in hand.

> Guy once posted a message about enhancing the "Unix IDE":
> 
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hackers-il/message/3681

The task of looking for references and examples is just one of the tasks
which Guy's approach would optimize.  I claim that optimizing this task
has huge payoff.

> > One possible (and relatively simple) way to implement it:
> > You set the IDE to execute a macro, with arguments which you supply,
> > each time you modify its definition.  Then display the resulting code in
> > a separate window pane.  Then you can see immediately the effects of
> > changes in the macro definition.
> 
> Hmmm... wouldn't it still require some work from the programmer? Can you point 
> to an implementation of this for a different Lisp dialect?

I never saw such an implementation.

The programmer has to tell the IDE that he wants to have the macro
automatically invoked with certain arguments each time it is modified;
and to have the resulting code automatically displayed in a pane.

Then it will work somewhat like Watch windows in a debugger IDE (the
windows which display variable or register values, which change each
time you step through an instruction in a debugger).

                                              --- Omer
-- 
You haven't made an impact on the world before you caused a Debian
release to be named after Snufkin.
My own blog is at http://tddpirate.livejournal.com/

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