A call for source code CSS

http://www.twobraids.com/2013/05/a-call-for-source-code-css.html

by lxt • 13 years ago

18 3 13 years ago

mynegation• 13 years ago

That is a good idea! One difference from CSS though is that code presentation rules should be reversible. E.g. when you author a Python code with more than 79 characters in line, your environment should seamlessly convert it to PEP-8 compliant source before checking it into the repository.

lowmagnet• 13 years ago

It sounds like an editor that works in abstract syntax trees and writes out screen (styled) and disk (pep 8) representations.

ilaksh• 13 years ago

Yup. And there are editors that work along those lines.

I like the idea but I don't think it goes far enough.

One comment about the thing with the 80 character limit. I would say that it is less about people's minds working differently than it is about having different belief systems.

For example, there are a lot of people that grew up learning the belief that long lines are bad programming practice. And that's how they see the world.

Often what happens is that technologies evolve but our beliefs do not. This is one example: it used to be very hard to manage editing code with long lines, simply because editors did not have scroll bars. In that case, it was bad practice.

However, modern editors have scroll bars.

Now, on to something a little more controversial: it is a near-universal belief that programming must be authored in a textual language, otherwise it isn't programming, or cannot be effective.

I believe that this is another belief that has become outdated. In fact, I believe that source code is the number one thing holding back software development.

Source code is not a structured data format. It is a textual format where the presentation and data and together. HTML and CSS separate the presentation (CSS) from the structure data (HTML).

I actually believe that building web pages and web applications by manually coding HTML and CSS, even though that is what I do since everyone does it and it is practical given current tools and belief systems, is very stupid and based on outdated beliefs.

Back when we started programming, we didn't used to have graphical user interfaces at all. Therefore, editing programs as text was our only option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3033

A call for source code CSS

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