Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

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On one hand, requiring a custom IDE to work with code just seems like a recipe for disaster.

But on the other hand, when I started Clojure full time, I switched to using Emacs + Paredit + CIDER (née nrepl.el). And come to think of it, I still open Xcode whenever I'm about to crank out any Swift or Objective-C code.

I think the difference between those situations and Lamdu's approach is that you still can access the files using any other editor you want. You just don't want to, because that given editor is best(ish) for that given language due to IDE features that help edit it more conveniently. Whereas this Lamdu stuff isn't just a matter of convenience, it's part of the language/environment/experience itself.

So yeah, I would never touch this, because it's basically got lock-in that requires its own custom everything, from version control, to needing to rewrite plugins my editor has but Lamdu doesn't (if that's even possible!), etc.

Isn't this the "sunk cost fallacy"? i.e. we've spent X effort-years creating text-based tools, might as well keep going with them, even if there's a potentially better way of programming?

Imagine semantic version control that can parse your AST and tell you which methods, expression, classes, functions etc were modified, instead of just syntax changes like "this line of text is different because you added a semicolon."

I'd love to see more semantic-focused tools, eventually leading to generic solutions that work across any AST. Polyglot IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA can come close, but only because they implement their own parsers, to derive an... AST!

Do you ever use a spreadsheet?

Spreadsheets are not on the same level of complexity as programming and never can be. (In this way, I suppose I disagree with Chris Granger's latest ambitions.) I use spreadsheets for the tasks they're best at, and if I need CSV or some other format, I can always export it.

But what are their advantages? After all, their supposed advantage is their live programming, which you claim you already have with ordinary programming languages.

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