[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > But I can't help feeling that, as I infer from Alan's comments, we > programmers are languishing in a fairly impoverished visual landscape > when it comes to working with code, perhaps due to the strong ties to > ASCII and the perceived need to have stuff editable on son-of-vt320, > and printable by a five-year old LaserJet.
So ... I know the PPIG list is just here for speculation and ranting, not really to change anything :-) ... BUT, just on the crazy off-chance that anyone is interested in improving the world - how would we go about fixing the situation? Ron Baecker and Aaron Marcus's system (which is also nicely summarised in the chapter "Publishing C Programs" in the MIT Press software visualisation book), has for many years now been the only serious attempt to apply typographic expertise to software. The theoretical perspective of the time was sufficient for them to look at publication, but not at interaction with typographic structures - we had to wait for Cognitive Dimensions to do that. This would be a good time to attempt a decent, typographically competent, programming editor. One of the major obstacles is the "Mr Grumpy" critique. Not so much "if it ain't broke don't fix it", but rather "it's broke, but I don't want you to fix it because I want to keep my broken one". These people will never change their tools, but maybe their tools will change. Many innovations in source code manipulation have appeared first in Emacs, and I think we should turn to Emacs as the most practical research venue. Sadly, it seems we have an immediate obstacle in the font support built in to Emacs. I recently wasted a very unhappy day trying to configure Emacs to change font reliably, and I'm fairly convinced that the font management is very broken, perhaps needing reimplementing from scratch. Would it be worth the effort of fixing this as a first step toward a non-VT100 program editor? Alan -- Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
