Bayle Shanks's website: proj-oot-ootIdeNotes2

Why are programming environments still so primitive?

In different ways, Mathematica, Genera, and Smalltalk put almost every other programming environment to shame. Atom, Sublime Edit, and Visual Studio Code are neat, but they do not represent a great improvement over TextMate? circa 2007. Emacs and Vim have advanced by even less.

Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? Why in the name of the good lord are REPLs still textual? Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else? Why isn't my editor integrated with the terminal? Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved? "

[1]

" >Why are programming environments still so primitive?

This guy should try working with plan9 and acme for a few months. Author, if you're reading these comments, you should install 9front, spend a weekend grokking it and becoming comfortable in a workflow there, then set up a Linux VM with vmx(3) and a 9P mount to your host system to get your Real Work done while continuing to learn about the plan9 model. Be prepared for your entire workflow to be turned on its head and to have to find creative ways out of your problems. Maybe today is one of those days where you change your life in a big way :) " [2]

 ricardobeat 4 hours ago [-]

> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? Why in the name of the good lord are REPLs still textual? Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else? Why isn't my editor integrated with the terminal? Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?

I think all of these are possible already in VSCode/Atom, and especially true if you’re doing reactive UI programming for the web - time travelling, improved REPL, live debugging are all there. A very good spot to be in :)

munin 1 hour ago [-]

> Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?

Doesn't the Facebook editor / autocompleter do that? I guess it's not available to anyone outside Facebook?

print debugging is extremely versatile and the market has spoken that, apparently, nothing else has the same expressive power to overhead trade-off. I have a few theories: tool usability sucks (looking at you gdb), debugging and writing code are two different disciplines so if you can stay in the same modality (writing code) to do debugging it's one less thing that changes from under you, print debugging is versatile and can apply to everything from embedded to mobile to cloud to HPC. print debugging gets a lot of scorn but (if you want an appeal to authority) if you read "Coders at Work" no "famous" programmers use debuggers, they all use(d) print debugging.

melling 44 minutes ago [-]

All 15 of them?

The market has spoken, programmers want free stuff, and they’re happy doing it the old fashioned way.

Except for those who aren’t content:

[Insert videos from Bret Victor here]

https://vimeo.com/36579366

Lighttable is another attempt that comes to mind:

http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/

munin 8 minutes ago [-]

From my direct, personal, experience, it goes something like this:

"Don't you want better tools?" I'll ask

"Of course!" the programmer replies (note sometimes this is a conversation with myself) "but I don't want to pay anything for it" they caveat.

"That's no problem," I reply, "as long as it will make your life better."

"Well, that sounds good, but I also don't want to have to learn anything new."

"That..."

"Also, it has to just work from day one, if it doesn't quite work as soon as I touch it, I'll swear off it forever and go talk badly about it on twitter and hacker news."

"Ah..."

"Also, it has to work with every use case I can think of. Multi-threaded, GUI, deployed to HPC clusters running RHEL6 and also Docker containers running CoreOS?, and it should be able to help me be productive in either JavaScript? or s390 assembler. Also it should take no time to set up, and start giving me answers straightaway."

"Hm..."

"You know what, the methods I already have already satisfy all of these requirements and as a bonus, I don't have to learn anything new in order to use them. I spend enough time learning new frameworks to write software, why would I spend more time learning frameworks to debug software?"

"Because you spend more time debugging software than writing software?"

"Honestly the process of debugging, and the process of writing, have become so intertwined in my thinking, that distinction between them seems arbitrary and pointless."

"Thanks for your time."

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"autocomplete engine(!), go-to definition, hover type definition"

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curiousDog 2 days ago [-]

I haven't been keeping up with Go much these days but is there proper debugger support now? Or is it still a half-broken experience?

Groxx 2 days ago [-]

IMO: very much still half broken. Calling functions is still experimental[1] and in my experience has yet to work even once, there's no display formatting options (afaik) so you are often looking at a chunk of bytes instead of something useful (after diving several times more layers deep than other debuggers require), and you pretty often can't view memory that's in scope at another call stack location without going to that location. All of which gives you a pretty crippled experience, especially as it makes conditional breakpoints extremely limited in use.

That said, it's mostly just half, before it was like 3/4 or worse. It has improved in stability (I haven't had it randomly disconnect at all since late Go 1.9 days, but I haven't pressed it hard at all either) and GoLand?'s integration works well and is mostly fast. It just can't do anything except set breakpoints and view memory.

[1]: https://github.com/derekparker/delve/blob/master/Documentati...

org3432 2 days ago [-]

If you use Goland 2018 it's pretty seamless, there are a few things missing like being able to get ptr addresses and view values in hex, and it's a little laggy compared to VS but not bad.

pureadrenallen 2 days ago [-]

I've had really good luck using delve with vs code. Easy setup and good experience overall

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jimsmart 30 days ago [-]

There’s a tool called fix, it’s already part of the standard Go distribution. In the past (mostly pre 1.0, IIRC?), it’s used to apply changes to one’s codebase when migrating between Go releases that introduce incompatible changes.

https://golang.org/cmd/fix/

zapzupnz 27 days ago [-]

Can it be used in editors, say VS Code, to provide fix-its or suggestions for improving code on a line-by-line basis? If so, that sounds great. A lot of languages are missing this in their standard distributions and devs must rely on third-party offerings.

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matklad 17 hours ago [-]

IntelliJ? predates Roslyn. While it’s not a full compiler (doesn’t do codegen), it naturally does all the front-end bits which are required for IDEs.

Note that “incremental parsing” is a nice to have, but is not required for IDEs. What is required are lazy name resolution and lazy type inference.

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"The initial uses of IntelliCode? are conservative; it provides smarter IntelliSense? completion suggestions by knowing which suggestions are more likely to be used, based on how other projects use the same APIs."

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"The lexing/parsing that is required for highlighting is easy to make incremental for all sane programming languages.

for LL(star) grammars, adding incrementality is completely trivial (i sent patches to ANTLR4 to do this)

for LR(k) grammars, it's more annoying but possible (tree-sitter does this)" -- [3]