> I'm extremely interested in the idea of taking the syntax highlighting, formatting, and code completion OUT of these specialized IDEs and plugins and into some kind of standard "bidirectional channel" between a language processor or compiler, its macro system, and the user's editor of choice.
Well maybe if we stopped using ASCII files as our source code and used a richer type of document we could start to make some improvements!
What kind of rich document? Well, what about HTML? Did you know you can even embed interactive elements in such documents? What if we started embedding our source code and editors in our documents instead of the other way around? The whole model is inverted, but mainly for historical reasons, because you know, in 1979 all we had was VT100 to interface with our machines... it's like we never moved on... why is my "code" a splattering of ASCII files in a directory? A package definition, tests, dotfiles for this and for that... ship the editor, the tests, the docs, the examples, and the source ALL as one document!
Well maybe if we stopped using ASCII files as our source code and used a richer type of document we could start to make some improvements!
What kind of rich document? Well, what about HTML? Did you know you can even embed interactive elements in such documents? What if we started embedding our source code and editors in our documents instead of the other way around? The whole model is inverted, but mainly for historical reasons, because you know, in 1979 all we had was VT100 to interface with our machines... it's like we never moved on... why is my "code" a splattering of ASCII files in a directory? A package definition, tests, dotfiles for this and for that... ship the editor, the tests, the docs, the examples, and the source ALL as one document!