> On 25 Jan 2019, at 09:24, eftomi <tomaz.t...@ef.uni-lj.si> wrote: > > When there is a question about editing the code, we can look for the > philosophies of other editors/IDEs. For instance, authors of VSCode are > saying <https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/whyvscode > <https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/whyvscode>> "First and > foremost, it is an editor that gets out of your way. The delightfully > frictionless edit-build-debug cycle means less time fiddling with your > environment, and more time executing on your ideas." > > How far away from this idea is Pharo, if we compare both worlds? Pharo is an > OS, IDE, editor and a language - but can we make it to get out of our way in > the sense of developers' effort expectancy?
We can of course argue about all of this for a long time - I think Sven nailed it though - people can do what they want (its OSS and its ours). You don’t have to use the editor in Pharo and you can edit Tonel in a text editor and commit it via git (I have to confess, when messing around with a pet project hooked up to a GitLab CI system, this was convenient when using an iPhone on the train for quick tweaks to try out an idea without a laptop. I don’t think I would want to program this way all the time though). HOWEVER - I don’t think we have the resources necessary to do a great job of a traditional environment and an awesome job on a future looking environment (the latter being where we have the hearts and minds, and also really differentiate ourselves). Of course - if there are folks that are passionate enough to go away and do this really well - then I don’t think anyone would stop them. BUT I wouldn’t want to see some of our best resources spend time on this. I would like to improve the tools we’ve got (I’m loving the inspiration for the Feenk guys). I would prefer the we make our integrated editor better, as well as keep pressing on Calypso (its better but still needs more work), and keep improving git integration as well as the compiler and some of the reification of things that we keep doing. As an aside - we can all make the editing tools better (e.g. borrow things from VIM or Emacs) - I know I added a small feature in P7 (that possibly not many realise) where you can now click anywhere on message (and not have to highlight all of it) and browse senders/implementers (e.g. meta-M). This is made possible because our tools are not simply text (like VIM/Emacs) - you have the full AST at hand and can reason on the code and your cursor locations. Similarly, you might not also realise that can also use META-2 to intelligently select wider portions of code - which is great for refactoring or correcting a mistake (e.g. put your cursor inside a comment and press META-2). Repeatedly doing this will expand the selection (great inside a block of code). Again - this is the power of an intelligent environment. It also doesn’t take a lot of code and it was something I taught myself because our environment is so discoverable. I do think we can extend Calypso to show code in a less confined way - I too am not so keen on seeing only one method or flipping between class/instance - but again our tools are malleable and great at exploring these ideas (and I believe the Calypso model actually supports this experimentation - but I will find out, as that is the itch I want to scratch next). Tim
