| Re: [e4-dev] RFC: IDE GUI, alternative development workflow |
Hi Anton,
Thank you for your email, I appreciate the effort you put into it. I hope you don't mind when I respond in a very frank way. Don't let my feedback discourage you, if you don't like it feel free to file it under "an old smalltalk dude's irrelevant opinion".
> Main benefits of this approach are:
> - you are not writing code
Here in our office in Ottawa, a common saying is "Just write the code!" [1]. What we mean by this is that you are kidding yourself if you think you can avoid writing "the code" by introducing one more layer of abstraction, or going meta. In the end, to have the computer do what you want it to do, "the code" has to be there in some form. So if you add abstractions or indirections, these will be there in addition to "the code". In many cases, just writing "the code", and not more, results in the simplest solution. Easy to write, easy to understand, and easy to change.
> Main developer interaction is by dragging and dropping which can
> create links/wires (see http://neyric.github.com/wireit/ for
> reference). The screen real estate (the workspace) is managed by
> panning and similar approach as Code bubbles
> (http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm). Method and
> function parameters become slots where you can drop data.
These are interesting approaches. However, I am highly skeptical, because from my experience, 2D wiring of components often results in configurations that are hard to grasp visually even though they could be expressed succinctly in textual form.
Rather than targeting the e4 project, have you thought about creating a new project on http://eclipselabs.org or on GitHub? To "sell" your idea to the existing e4 committers, it might be useful to be able to point to something that is in a demoable state.
Good luck!
Boris
[1] I've first heard this from Steve Northover, but I am not sure if the quote is his own.