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by paulddraper 3302 days ago
Sounds great in theory.

The dirty reality is that text is the lowest common denominator, and as such, most reusable.

Speaking of Microsoft, I would rather manage flat config files than structured registry editors.

1 comments

I know. That's why I think it's a very difficult but worthwhile problem to tackle.

We have stopped questioning certain things and take them for granted and those come with certain constraints and limit our progress.

(Such as the idea that any programming must involve editing text that is stored in a collection of files and folders)

I also think we under-estimate how pleasant a structured editor can be.

Most programmers associate those things with "toys" or think of them as not hardcore enough for their skills, some clunky drag-and-drop GUI editor that insults the mad skills of the precious programmer who has embedded vim/emacs bindings in his/her muscle memory.

It doesn't have to be that way. If it's flexible enough it can look almost like a plain text editor. But it would be one on steroids. It could do holy-grail stuff in terms of suggestions/intellisense/auto-complete and so on because of its rich understanding of the underlying structure.