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by dotopotoro 1395 days ago
You should check out IDEs :)

IDE takes plain old text as input, and lets the coder to interact with the model of the program.

1. Various graphical hints in text (highlighting keywords, selections, …)

2. Visualisation tools (draw database and class diagrams)

3. Navigation capabilities (go to implementation, definition etc)

4. Refactoring capabilities (“rename, “extract variable”, …)

In my view, IDE is already “book with diagrams”. (“Diagrams” can still be improved, but concept is really there)

1 comments

True, but IDEs are currently severely limited by nature of textual sources (e.g. macros are notoriously tricky to deal with). It's much easier to start from a good model for IDE and derive textual reprentation and input method from that.