Re: [Haskell-cafe] What features should an (fictitious) IDE for Haskell have?

Some time ago there was a thread about an article where the author advocated for extremely long and descriptive variable names. Discussion spread if that is the right approach and what is the best variable name length and descriptiveness. The correct choice depends on the reader context. The article author works as a contractor. He reads a lot of code for the first time. Long and descriptive variable names help him a lot. For someone else, well acquainted with the code, are such long names only a clutter that reduces readability. They might prefer single letter variable names, or pointfree style. So each of them goes and adjusts the variable name descriptiveness slider in the fictitious IDE aproppriately. The todays text-as-the-primary-representation approach however forces the author to make a pick already when writing the code. On 12/1/20 2:06 AM, Mig Mit wrote:

Please DO store code as ascii text. At the very least that would allow the use of external tools — sed, diff, git, whatever. Non-ascii representations were tried multiple times, and largely failed, in particular because of terrible interaction with other tools.

Also, please make sure your IDE is a good text editor. Because that's what the code is — not AST, but text. Until it is finished (to a certain lax definition of "finished") it is likely to not even be representable in AST form.

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On 2020. Dec 1., at 2:02, MarLinn wrote:



Most importantly: A good IDE is not a text editor, but an AST editor. If the AST happens to be presented as text, that's a choice of visualisation, nothing more. Better to start with a graph-like visualisation to free the mind, then think through the possible interactions. Maybe add the typical text-like visualisation later. But don't start there or you'll just re-invent notepad for the nth time.

Maybe don't even /store/ the code as ascii text.

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