I don't know about you but getting real autocomplete and refactoring in Emacs for M languages is a dream come true for me. I don't want a different IDE for each language. I want one Editor to Rule Them All.
Making the infrastructure to understand a programming language shareable between all the ways to edit/refactor/analyze code in that language is far from dumb. It's something Eclipse/IntelliJ/VisualStudio should have done a long long time ago. Heck I once attempted to pick apart the tooling in Eclipse into something I could use headless without booting the entire thing and the code was so tightly integrated into their GUI I gave up in disgust. I mean this is architecture 101. Clear API's and division of labor should have been on everyone's mind but instead the whole thing is a pile of spaghetti code.
Even something as simple as a CLI interface to your IDE's language support features so I could integrate them into editor of my choice would have been smart. But no one did that. I work with 4 different languages minimum every day at work. I'm not going to context switch my editor/IDE for each one of them. For this reason I'm cheering Yegge on like mad.
(Full disclosure: I work at google same as Yegge. I've had these opinions for longer than I've worked there though.)
> getting real autocomplete and refactoring in Emacs for M languages is a dream come true for me
Even just one. The Python RefactoringBrowser takes tends of seconds just to make a mess of the whole thing. It's a nice effort, but it fails on both reliability and speed.
It is dumb the way it's phrased. The easiest way to achieve it is to define a super language that all other languages can be shallowly encodes into. Describing this as ambitious is dumb.
Making the infrastructure to understand a programming language shareable between all the ways to edit/refactor/analyze code in that language is far from dumb. It's something Eclipse/IntelliJ/VisualStudio should have done a long long time ago. Heck I once attempted to pick apart the tooling in Eclipse into something I could use headless without booting the entire thing and the code was so tightly integrated into their GUI I gave up in disgust. I mean this is architecture 101. Clear API's and division of labor should have been on everyone's mind but instead the whole thing is a pile of spaghetti code.
Even something as simple as a CLI interface to your IDE's language support features so I could integrate them into editor of my choice would have been smart. But no one did that. I work with 4 different languages minimum every day at work. I'm not going to context switch my editor/IDE for each one of them. For this reason I'm cheering Yegge on like mad.
(Full disclosure: I work at google same as Yegge. I've had these opinions for longer than I've worked there though.)