Friday, March 29, 2013

Context restoration

One of the things I have the worst trouble with, in programming, is context restoration.  I suspect this is a large part of what makes an IDE valuable, honestly.

The context of a task is just that - it's workflow.  It's all the files involved in an activity, where you are in them, your notes and insights, bookmarks to documentation involved, and so on.  It's something a workflow engine would have to provide anyway for any longer-running task.

But it can also be seen as the semantic context of a given task.  A semantic programming system should include not only just the current code that addresses a given set of needs, but the history of that code, why changes were needed, and the thoughts of human programmers as they addressed them.  There should be rich context for everything.

If you have to laboriously write it all up, though, you'll never get anything done. A semantic programming system should be a sort of assistant that (hopefully) understands what you're doing to the point that it can explain it to others.

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