On Mon, 2007-21-05 at 11:47 +0100, Jules Bean wrote:

Michael T. Richter wrote:
>    1. A real GUI environment that takes into account some of the HID
>       advances made in the past 30 years.  (Emacs and Vim don't count,
>       in other words.)

That particular part is trolling. Both emacs and vim take into account 
many of the HID advances made in the past 30 years. You're going to have 
to be more explicit about what you find unacceptable about them to get 
useful answers, in my opinion.

Vim is eliminated before it reaches the gate because it's a modal editor. Even with GVim in place, it still has that modal stench to it that leaps up and bites at awkward moments. And HID advances (the modal issue aside)? Go to an underpowered little editor like Gedit (what I use currently for raw Haskell, but which sadly isn't applicable to .lhs files of either stripe) and adjust your editing preferences. It's not a particularly good programmer's editor, but look at the lovely tabbed dialog box with all those lovely HID bits like checkboxes, radio buttons, spin buttons, dropdown lists, lists, etc. Now do the same in GVim and get ... a text file with some editing tricks to make things slightly easier. (It's not immediately obvious how to get rid of it either.) Where is the accounting for HID advances there? (Raw Vim is even worse.)

Hell, even comparing the out-of-the-box syntax highlighting support in Gedit vs. (G)Vim is instructive. Code like "makeRandomValueST :: StdGen -> (MyType, StdGen)" (which, incidentally, was far easier to copy from in Gedit than GVim to paste into this message) only differentiates "::" and "->" from the text and delimiters in GVim while in Gedit (keeping in mind that Gedit isn't a very good editor!) differentiates those plus "makeRandomValueST" vs. "StdGen" and "MyType". And the parentheses.

(G)Vim is losing to freakin' GEDIT here! The Notepad of the GNOME world.

Emacs is its own set of nightmares. I'm not even going to start going down the path of that particular holy war (and bucky-bit Hell). I'll acknowledge freely that it's an incredibly powerful programming environment. It just really doesn't play well with others at almost any level and quite definitely doesn't have anything resembling modern HID thought behind it. (To be fair to it, it does predate most modern HID work by a couple of decades.)

--
Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter@gmail.com> (GoogleTalk: ttmrichter@gmail.com)
All really first class designers are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of the plans, energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. (Nevil Shute)