Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of IntelliJ IDEA.
In the past, I’ve always had an eye for people who replaced the ASCII text editor with something … better. Imagine you could use a table to define your constants in Java. And with table, I mean “Excel” not “align-with-space-until-it-you-go-insane.”
JetBrains is working on this: Table support in MPS 2.0
Let me make this clear: A DSL is nice. But there are so many things that you simply can’t express well with text. State machines. Repeated code. Sometimes, you don’t need the exact words to convey the idea.
I think I’ll waste some time with MPS 2.0 M3 next weekend. There are a couple of tutorials and demos.
Related Articles:
- The Next Best Thing – Series in my blog where I dream about the future of software development
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[…] course, this begs for a way to add lots of additional information to source code. As I said before, we probably want better editors than the plain text editors we have today. It should be possible […]