Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

I tried Emacs and decided that I dislike it. I understand the reason why it is like that, but I refuse to lower my user interface expectations that low.

Generally, I have noticed the trend that a software which is praised as superior often comes with a worse user interface, or ignores some other part of user experience. I can understand that a software with smaller userbase cannot put enough resources to its non-critical parts. That makes sense. But I suspect there later appears a mindkilling thread of though, which goes like this: "Our software is superior. Our software does not have a feature X. Therefore, not having a feature X is an advantage, because ." As in: we don't need 21st-century-style user interface, because good programmers don't need such things.

By wanting a "Lisp experience" I mean I would like to experience (or falsify the existence of) the nirvana frequently described by Paul Graham. Not to replicate 1:1 Richard Stallman's working conditions in 1980s. :D

A perfect solution would be to combine the powerful features of Lisp with the convenience of modern development tools. I emphasize the convenience for pragmatic reasons, but also as a proxy for "many people with priorities similar to me are using it".

My current understanding of present IDEs is that they are both very language-bound and need a huge amount of work to become truly usable. That means that for any language that doesn't currently enjoy large industry acceptance, I basically don't expect to have any sort of modern usable IDE.

I'm not personally hung up on the Emacs thing, but then again my recipe for a development environment is Your Favorite General Purpose Text Editor, printf statements for debugging code, a console to read the printf output, and a read-eval-print-loop for the programming la... (read more)

3gwern14y

Consider an equilibrium of various software products none of which are strictly superior or inferior to each other. Upon hearing that the best argument someone can make for software X is that it has feature Y (which is unrelated to UI), should your expectation of good IU go up or go down? (To try it a different way: suppose you are in a highly competitive company like Facebooglazon and you meet a certain programmer who is the rudest most arrogant son of a bitch you ever met - yet he is somehow still employed there. What should you infer about the quality of the code he writes?)

0vi21maobk9vp14y

Well, for me Vim bindings are something that (after some learning) started to make a lot of sense. Emacs (after the same amount of learning) didn't make that much sense... As text editors, modern IDEs are still weaker than any of them; the choice what to forfeit usually has to be done - sometimes you can embed your editor inside IDE instead of the native one, though. For satisfying your curiousity, I guess you could try out free-of-charge Allegro Common Lisp version. It is personal no-deployment no-commercial-use no-commercial-research no-university-research no-government researh edition. I never looked at it because I am OK with Vim and I don't want to have something dependent on ACL that I cannot use in my day-job projects. Neither is a good reason for you not to try it...