02 Jan 2016

How modern languages will save the text editor

Interesting post about programming language writing tools.

[…] the languages were developed in complete ignorance of these tools, which made them somewhat hostile to those goals (anybody who tried to implement a correct C++ parser knows what I mean, life before clang was just painful). As a result, very complex tools making heavy use of specialized partial parsers, static analysis, and crazy heuristics emerged. And they emerged as part of even more complex development suites to combine them all in a coherent form: the IDE was born.

[…]

But more recently, things took a different turn (for the best I think): a new language emerged that was promoting a different paradigm: Go. Instead of making the tooling an afterthought, it’s been pretty much there at some level since inception. It even shows in the language grammar itself, which is designed to enable fast compilation, partial parsing, and a whole bunch of analysis tools.

It resonates with an old paper I'm reading: Programming in an interactive environment the “LISP” experience by Eric Sandewall.