[Grace-core] Putative Blog Posts

[Michael Kölling]

On 8 Nov 2010, at 08:10, James Noble wrote:

>>> I think there is a fundamental question lurking behind this: Do we expect Grace to be written (in general) in a specialised IDE, or do we also support wiring in a POTE (Plain Old Text Editor) as a "normal" case?
>> 
>> I think that I got James and Kim to agree that the "normal case" is an IDE.   However, I'm not sure if they realize the implications of this!
> 
> yes - but not necessarily just *one* IDE.
> We expect there will be - or may be - more than one.

Yes, that's good. I like that. (For the record, I think that all development should and will be done in IDEs in a short while. Using generic text editors will be for those folk who also refuse to use a compiler because you can write machine instructions by hand. It will soon be like writing Postscript by hand is today.)

Of course there should be multiple tools, and that also means there needs to be one common (readable) text format. But once you assume an IDE as the standard case you can make some assumptions and requirements. (I'll come back to that in another email about layout.)

> sure - or you can go the whole way towards BETA, or towards
> several visual languages - where the line between the "IDE"
> and the language is very blurry, to say the least.

Much as I like IDEs, I think we should keep the line very clear. I think the merging of the environment and language has not helped Smalltalk, for example.


> But the catch with that is that all the other tools no longer work.
> You can't get diffs (or at least not outside the IDE)
> standard repositories can't easily send diffs of checked in changes

That's a very important point. There needs to be a clear, canonical text format so that such tools work well.

Michael