- IDEs are important to Java because Java has lousy code arrangement - lots of tiny files with framework-induced nomenclature. So the IDE is a navigational tool. That squares with my memories of working with Visual Studio back in the day - vast amounts of boilerplate and Studio was really necessary to find the good stuff.
- Textadept is a programming editor written mostly in Lua, that also uses Scintilla as the editor component. This makes it kinda like Padre (no doubt why it has no Perl tools).
- Zen Coding is ... typing acceleration for HTML and CSS.
I have some pretty decent thoughts about these links, but it's late and the thoughts are rather inchoate. Short version: every set of code is a text that is written in a formal language in order to express some carefully defined syntactic structures that can be translated into code or actions. But - and this is again not a new insight - those syntactic structures are a reflection of the deeper semantic structures in the programmer's mind as she comprehends the problem to be solved.
The actual program may or may not solve that problem (hence the need for good testing), but its intent is to do so. In reading code, we attempt to discover that intent and reconstruct the deep semantics. What I'd like to do in an IDE and/or editor is to maintain something approximating those semantics in a structure during editing. As that toolset improves, you could communicate with the editor on a higher level, interacting with the semantics and letting the toolset manipulate the specific code.
Because you don't actually care about the code any more than you care about assembler. (Unless you care about assembler, but that's a different point.) You want to solve your problem.
By looking at competitive programming problems and problem statements, I hope I'll be able to have small enough and abstracted enough snippets of semantics that it will be realistic to think about how the semantic comprehension of the problem statement is translated into program structure.
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