This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Mark Levison.
Original Post: Programs still edited as text? Why?
Feed Title: Mark Levison
Feed URL: /WebLog/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/WebLog/mlevison/Rss.aspx
Feed Description: Musings on No Touch Deployment, .NET development and photography
Isn't it odd that almost 50 years after the creation of modern compiled
languages (Fortran ~1957), we're still editing text and discussing name
conventions.
On one of my mailing lists in the past couple of days there has been a
discussion around lightweight Hungarian notations. Specifically the use of
this.someMemberVariable vs m_someMemberVariable etc. This made me think (a
rare event), about why we need textual conventions when the IDE could just give
the information we need.
It seems the underlying problem is that our
IDE's don't automatically tell us what the scope of these variables are.
If member variables, statics, consts, params were all highlighted
differently - we could get rid of many of these textual conventions.
In
the best of all possible worlds we would have graphical editors[1], [2], [3]
that allowed us to edit our parse trees directly. There would never again a
formatting argument - we could all format our code the way we want. If we wanted
Hungarian naming that would also be personal choice. Most sytnax errors
would be a thing of the past. How do we get there from here?
Does anyone
MS research/Sun/IBM want to hire me for this project??
Previous Topic
