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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's a language primarily by and for text editor users, and I'm beyond that point these days.

What do you mean?

EDIT: Imagine a programming language designed around an IDE. Fun thought. Not sure whether it's a useful thought, but it's fun to think about.

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I actually regret that comment. I feel I was being a bit too negative in my original post, and I don't want to add fuel to the fire by continuing the argument here.

No, no... I'm sorry if my comment sounded strange. I wasn't being ironic or snarky, I was being genuine.

What are your thoughts regarding IDEs vs editors? It's an important topic.

Honestly, as a guy who works on a lot of old code that I didn't write, IDEs are a complete godsend. Features like 'find me everywhere this method gets called', or 'find everywhere this value gets written to', and just simple navigation between functions/files. They're a backbone of my maintenance programming strategies, and I don't know what I'd do without them.

I do all of my javascript coding in vim and don't miss IDEs so much, but that's because I mostly only work on my own javascript code. For large, multi-person projects I massively prefer working inside an IDE.

I think the real key here is not ide friendliness, but "compiler as a service." The compiler, by definition, is already capable of understanding our code. If that understanding can be exposed as a standard api, we can build up a set of powerful capabilities for refactoring and much deeper programmatic transformations. With very large code bases, this is no longer just nice-to-have ... it is the next tool we should rationally insist on.

And we shall call it Java.

That isn't really the case at all. Java (the language) is relatively small and simple. Java code can be written quite easily without an IDE. In fact, that's how it was done for many years by most Java developers, before Eclipse, NetBeans and other IDEs became more commonly used.

The unnecessarily complex design of many Java libraries and frameworks is generally what pushed developers toward using an IDE, not the language itself.

Actually we call them Smalltalk, Interlisp, Delphi, Visual Basic and Eiffel.

Text Editor vs IDE.

Hmm... I don't understand why it has to be Text Editor vs IDE. The two concepts are orthogonal. One is for editing text; the other is for understanding and autocompleting text. If their concern is that there aren't any good tools for Rust yet, that'll be solved with time.

I think you are missing the point of the statement. If one was designing a language meant to be developed in an IDE, you can hold various assumptions which would influence how syntax shapes up.

A trivial example which is not related to rust but I think serves as a decent example, you can assume the IDE will color/italicize/etc member variables to get rid of _var __var var__ nonsense. You can also use slightly less verbose terms even if they are less informative if you assume a tooltip with a concise and complete explanation pops up.

I'm a little terrified by the prospect of a language designed to be incomprehensible without a stack of tools that will explain it to you.

I'm not sure how interesting this topic really is. As an example, look at Smalltalk. Crazy easy syntax, and made to be used in an IDE that dwarf what most of us consider an IDE.

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