Saturday, February 19, 2011

Browsers will let PLs break free from plain text

Programs really aren't plain text. Or they shouldn't be.

But until now there was no way out. OSes come with Ed, and Ed is the standard text editor.

But pretty soon, we'll want to do development in our browsers.

Do we really want to port our 1960's plain text infrastructure to browsers? Surely the answer must be a resounding ``No!''

Reinventing integrated development environments in the browser will make it possible to ditch plain text, and switch to the multimedial representations our programs deserve.

Finally.

5 comments:

Dan Hackney said...

Heresy! What gall you have even to suggest such blasphemy!

In all seriousness, it certainly holds promise, but I'm skeptical that the improvement would be large enough to offset giving up our existing tools.

Manuel Simoni said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Manuel Simoni said...

@Daniel: the point is that we need new tools anyway for the browser - or we could just run Emacs in Native Client of course. :P

patrickdlogan said...

"Reinventing integrated development environments in the browser"

Yes, and hopefully it will be *reinventing* as you state, and not just "moving Eclipse to the browser". Ugh. (But, hey, emacs in NaCl could doit for me.)

Anonymous said...

Ignoring what tools exist currently, what benefits might there be in using something other than just plain text to program computers?