Why can't we embed vim or emacs in a web document?
Can I please point out that building graphical interfaces in ASCII is just about as bone-headed as my suggestion? :)
Can I please point out that building graphical interfaces in ASCII is just about as bone-headed as my suggestion? :)
We can, that's not the issue. The problem is that if you embed an editor - any editor - into the project, you're forcing everyone to use it, while currently each developer has the freedom to choose his own.
And if don't embed the editor, then there's nothing to discuss; one can already use web based editors if one wants to, and I can use VIM ;)
Can I please point out that building graphical interfaces in ASCII is just about as bone-headed as my suggestion? :)
The whole reason I like VIM is because it barely has any graphical interface. The whole experience is extremely content focused, without a mess of buttons and toolbars obstructing the vision. I talk to it[1], it does what I tell it, and it stays out of my way.
So I agree, but it doesn't apply in this case :)
[1] http://yanpritzker.com/2011/12/16/learn-to-speak-vim-verbs-n...
But then, how do we ship around the source editors meta data that is REALLY important, like, custom DSL syntax highlighting?
Do we need a universal syntax highlighting engine? What other universal engines do we need to build interfaces in to Emacs and Vim and Eclipse and XCode and Visual Studio in order to tackle some of these issues?
Why not embed the whole OS? Now it is starting to sound like the apple ][ days.
Running editors (or whole operating systems, for that matter) in a browser seems like a backwards way of solving this. If you really need to ship a whole development environment including the editor, and not just the config files, project files or syntax highlighting plugins, you might as well use a virtual machine. If a programmer has no idea of how to set their editor of choice up for what they're developing, they won't be building a decent development environment in Javascript.
And this isn't about developers knowing how to set up their editors. It is more about DSLs. It is more about the fact that there is more to coding than just writing source. Hell, it is about trying to come up with a way that we aren't totally beholden to source! It's just data, and frankly, not the most important data around software!
Sometime other paradigms, and I don't just mean other languages, but things like spreadsheets, graphs, and visual languages can be great DSLs that properly model and convey information MUCH better than source... but you can't really embed those in eclipse or vim, can you?
Think about if you released a project on GitHub and it didn't have tests, documentation, or example use. Would anyone use it? What if it was competing with other projects that DID have tests, docs, and examples? What is that code with tests was slightly worse? Which project are other developers going to want to interact with and use?
We live in a world were our programs, our source, and our peers live in a distributed ecosystem and as far as I can tell our tools and operating systems are starting to get in the way.
Have you seen how awfully messy web development becomes when you try to bootstrap from a filesystem? Things like JSFiddle are MUCH more elegant, but are, how shall I put it... missing some key tools for a new ecosystem of distributed computing. ;)