Comments on You work for me, Computer: Language-oriented programming: too much, too fast

"good for providing DSL for clients to cusotmize p...

2009-02-17T02:24:00.000-08:00

"good for providing DSL for clients to cusotmize products"

Maybe if your clients are hardcore engineers, but in general asking clients to write code is a tough value proposition.

However, let's assume your clients are hardcore engineers. Not only does MPS ask them to learn a DSL, but it is also asking them to learn a new editor.

One step at a time.

I think you are right saying it is too much. Espec...

2009-02-17T02:21:00.000-08:00

I think you are right saying it is too much. Especially application developer might find MPS to be too much for achieving common programming task, but for library/frameworks and DSL creators it is IMHO very valuable proposal. It could be also good for providing DSL for clients to cusotmize products.

I'm not talking about "boxes and connections" I'm ...

2009-02-13T16:44:00.000-08:00

I'm not talking about "boxes and connections" I'm talking about representing the actual code blocks. Take a look at this tutorial:

http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/docs/tutorial.html

"I believe that the first stepping stone is the bo...

2009-02-11T03:17:00.000-08:00

"I believe that the first stepping stone is the box editor."

I went through this phase too. You'll eventually realize that visual editors are simply less efficient than text editors for programming purposes. The boxes convey less meaning than symbols in a text editor. The boxes and connections are also symbols, but they take up far more screen space than text, so you see much less code simultaneously, which makes the box editor less efficient. Also, there aren't usually restrictions on the layout of the boxes, so it's very hard to follow the "flow" of code in a visual editor. In a text editor, the flow of code within a function is at least mostly linear (left to right, top down).