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A realization I recently had:
Why don’t we abstract away all display affordances from a piece of code’s position in a file? That is, the editor reads the file, parses its AST, and displays it according to the programmer’s preference (e.g., elastic tabstops, elm-like comma-leading lists, newline/no-newline before opening braces, etc). And prior to save, the editor simply runs it through an uncustomized
prettierfirst.There are a million and one ways to view XML data without actually reading/writing pure XML. Why not do that with code as well?
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And once you take it a step further, it’s clear that it shouldn’t be in a text file in the first place. Code just isn’t text. If you store it as a tree or a graph in some sort of database, it becomes possible to interact with it in much more powerful ways (including displaying it any way you like). We’ve been hobbled by equating display representation with storage format.
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This talk touches on this issue, along with some related ones and HCI in general: Bret Victor: The Future of Programming
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God, I have been trying to recall the name of this talk for ages! Thank you so much, it is a great recommendation
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Text is great when (not if) your more complicated tools fail or do something you can’t tolerate and you need to use tools which don’t Respect The Intent of designers who, for whatever reason, don’t respect your intent or workflow. Sometimes, solving a problem means working around a breakage, whether or not that breakage is intentional on someone else’s part.
Besides, we just (like, last fifteen or so years) got text to the point where it’s largely compatible. Would be a shame to throw that away in favor of some new AST-database-thing which only exists on a few platforms.
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I’m not sure I get your point about about intent. Isn’t the same already true of, say, compilers? There are compiler bugs that we have to work around, there are programs that seem logical to us but the compiler won’t accept, and so on. Still, everybody seems to be mostly happy to file a compiler bug or a feature request, and live with a workaround for the present. Seems like it works well enough in practice.
I understand your concern about introducing a new format but it sounds like a case of worse-is-better. Sure, we get a lot of convenience from the ubiquity of text, but it would nevertheless be sad if we were stuck with it for the next two centuries.
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I’ve never seen anyone casually swap out the compiler for production code. Also, for the longest time, if you wrote C++ for Windows, you pretty much had to use the Microsoft compiler. I’m sure that there are many embedded platforms with a single compiler.
If there’s a bug in the compiler, in most casss you work around it, then patiently wait for a fix from the vendor.
So that’s hardly a valid counterpoint.
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Yes, I’m aware of that, but what does it have to do with anything I said?
EDIT: Hey, I went to Canterbury :)
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“I’ve never seen anyone casually swap out the compiler for production code” sounded like you were saying people didn’t tend to compile the same production code on multiple compilers, which of course anyone that compiles on windows and non-windows does. Sorry if I misinterpreted your comment!
My first comment is in response to another Kiwi. Small world. Pretty cool.
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This, this, a thousand times this. Text is a good user-interface for code (for now). But it’s a terrible storage and interchange format. Every tool needs its own parser, and each one is slightly different, leaving begging the amount of cpu and programmer time we waste going from text<->ast<->text.
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Yeah, it’s obviously wasteful and limiting. Why do you think we are still stuck with text? Is it just sheer inertia and incrementalism, or does text really offer advantages that are challenging to recreate with other formats?
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The text editor I use can handle any computer language you can throw at it. It doesn’t matter if it’s BASIC, C, BCPL, C++, SQL, Prolog, Fortran 77, Pascal, x86 Assembler, Forth, Lisp, JavaScript, Java, Lua, Make, Hope, Go, Swift, Objective-C, Rexx, Ruby, XSLT, HTML, Perl, TCL, Clojure, 6502 Assembler, 68000 Assembler, COBOL, Coffee, Erlang, Haskell, Ocaml, ML, 6809 Assembler, PostScript, Scala, Brainfuck, or even Whitespace. [1]
Meanwhile, the last time I tried an IDE (last year I think) it crashed hard on a simple C program I attempted to load into it. It was valid C code [2]. That just reinforced my notion that we aren’t anywhere close to getting away from text.
[1] APL is an issue, but only because I can’t type the character set on my keyboard.
[2] But NOT C++, which of course, everybody uses, right?
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To your point about text editors working with any language, I think this is like arguing that the only tool required by a carpenter is a single large screwdriver: you can use it as a hammer, as a chisel, as a knife (if sharpened), as a wedge, as a nail puller, and so on. Just apply sufficient effort and ingenuity! Does that sound like an optimal solution?
My preference is for powerful specialised tools rather than a single thing that can be kind of sort of applied to a task.
Or, to approach from the opposite direction, would you say that a CAD application or Blender are bad tools because they only work with a limited number of formats? If only they also allowed you to edit JPEGs and PDFs, they would be so much better!
To your point about IDEs: I think that might even support my argument. Parsing of freeform text is apparently sufficiently hard that we’re still getting issues like the one you saw.
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I use other tools besides the text editor—I use version control, compilers, linkers, debuggers, and a whole litany of Unix tools (grep, sed, awk, sort, etc). The thing I want to point out is that as long as the source code is in ASCII (or UTF-8), I can edit it. I can study it. I might not be able to compile it (because I lack the INRAC compiler but I can still view the code). How does one “view” Smalltalk code when one doesn’t have Smalltalk? Or Visual Basic? Last I hear, Microsoft wasn’t giving out the format for Visual Basic programs (and good luck even finding the format for VB from the late 90s).
The other issue I have with IDEs (and I will come out and say I have a bias against the things because I’ve never had one that worked for me for any length of time without crashing, and I’ve tried quite a few over 30 years) is that you have one IDE for C++, and one for Java, and one for Pascal, and one for Assembly [1] and one for Lua and one for Python and man … that’s just too many damn environments to deal with [2]. Maybe there are IDEs now that can work with more than one language [3] but again, I’ve yet to find one that works.
I have nothing against specialized tools like AutoCAD or Blender or PhotoShop or even Deluxe Paint, as long as there is a way to extract the data when the tool (or the company) is no longer around. Photo Shop and Deluxe Paint work with defined formats that other tools can understand. I think Blender works with several formats, but I am not sure about AutoCAD (never having used it).
So, why hasn’t anyone stored and manipulated ASTs? I keep hearing cries that we should do it, but yet, no one has yet done it … I wonder if it’s harder than you even imagine …
Edited to add: Also, I’m a language maven, not a tool maven. It sounds like you are a tool maven. That colors our perspectives.
[1] Yes, I’ve come across several of those. Never understood the appeal …
[2] For work, I have to deal with C, C++, Lua, Make and Perl.
[3] Yeah, the last one that claimed C/C++ worked out so well for me.
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For your first concern about the long term accessibility of the code, you’ve already pointed out the solution: a defined open format.
Regarding IDEs: I’m not actually talking about IDEs; I’m talking about an editor that works with something other than text. Debugging, running the code, profiling etc. are different concerns and they can be handled separately (although again, the input would be something other than text). I suppose it would have some aspects of an IDE because you’d be manipulating the whole code base rather than individual files.
Regarding the language maven post: I enjoyed reading it a few years ago (and in practice, I’ve always ended up in the language camp as an early adopter). It was written 14 years ago, and I think the situation is different now. People have come to expect tooling, and it’s much easier to provide it in the form of editor/IDE plugins. Since language creators already have to do a huge amount of work to make programs in their languages executable in some form, I don’t think it would be an obstacle if the price of admission also included dealing with the storage format and representation.
To your point about lack of implementations: don’t Smalltalk and derivatives such as Pharo qualify? I don’t know if they store ASTs but at least they don’t store text. I think they demonstrate that it’s at least technically possible to get away from text, so the lack of mainstream adoption might be caused by non-technical reasons like being in a local maximum in terms of tools.
The problem, as always, is that there is such a huge number of tools already built around text that it’s very difficult to move to something else, even if the post-transition state of affairs would be much better.
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Text editors are language agnostic.
I’m trying to conceive of an “editor” that works with something other than text. Say an AST. Okay, but in Pascal, you have to declare variables at the top of each scope; you can declare variables anywhere in C++. In Lua, you can just use a variable, no declaration required. LISP, Lua and JavaScript allow anonymous functions; only the latest versions of C++ and Java allow anonymous functions, but they they’re restricted in that you can’t create closures, since C++ and Java have no concept of closures. C++ has exceptions, Java has two types of exceptions, C doesn’t; Lua kind of has exceptions but not really. An “AST editor” would have to somehow know that is and isn’t allowed per language, so if I’m editing C++ and write an anonymous function, I don’t reference variables outside the scope of said function, but that it can for Lua.
Okay, so we step away from AST—what other format do you see as being better than text?
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I don’t think it could be language agnostic - it would defeat the purpose as it wouldn’t be any more powerful than existing editors. However, I think it could offer largely the same UI, for similar languages at least.
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And that is my problem with it. As stated, I use C, C++ [1], Lua, Make and a bit of Perl. That’s at least what? Three different “editors” (C/C++, Lua/Perl (maybe), Make). No thank you, I’ll stick with a tool that can work with any language.
[1] Sparingly and where we have no choice; no one on my team actually enjoys it.
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Personally, I’m not saying you should need to give up your editor of choice. Text is a good (enough for now) UI for coding. But it’s a terrible format to build tools on. If the current state of the code lived in some sort of event-based graph database for example, your changes could trigger not only your incremental compiler, but source analysis (only on what’s new), it could also maintain a semantic changelog for version control, trigger code-generation (again, only what’s new).
There’s a million things that are currently “too hard” which would cease to be too hard if we had a live model of the code as various graphs (not just the ast, but call graphs, inheritance graphs, you-name-it) that we could subscribe to, or even write purely-functional consumers that are triggered only on changes.
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Inertia, arrogance, worse-is-better; Working systems being trapped behind closed doors at big companies; Hackers taking their language / editor / process on as part of their identity that needs to be defended with religious zeal; The complete destruction of dev tools as a viable business model; Methodologies-of-the-week…. The causes are numerous and varied, and the result is software dev is being hamstrung and we’re all wasting countless hours and dollars doing things computers should be doing for us.
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I think that part of the issue is that we haven’t seen good structured editor support outside of Haskell and some Lisps.
Having a principled foundation for structured editor + a critical mass by having it work for a language like Javascript/Ruby, would go a long way to making this concept more mainstream. After which we could say “provide a grammar for favorite language X and get structured editor support!”. This then becomes “everything is structured at all levels!”
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I think it’s possible that this only works for a subset of languages.
Structured editing is good in that it operates at a higher level than characters, but ultimately it’s still a text editing tool, isn’t it? For example, I think it should be trivial to pull up a list of (editable) definitions for all the functions in a project that call a given function, or to sort function and type definitions in different ways, or to substitute function calls in a function with the bodies of those functions to a given depth (as opposed to switching between different views to see what those functions do). I don’t think structured editing can help with tasks like that.
There are also ideas like Luna, have you seen it? I’m not convinced by the visual representation (it’s useful in some situations but I’m not sure it’s generally effective), but the interesting thing is they provide both a textual and a visual representation of the code.
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Smalltalk. The word you’re looking for is Smalltalk. ;)
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Possibly, but I’m only talking about a single aspect of it: being able to analyse and manipulate the code in more powerful ways than afforded by plain text. I think that’s equally possible for FP languages.
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Ultimately I think this is the only teneble solution. I feel I must be in the minority in having an extreme dislike of columnar-style code, and what I call “white space cliffs” where a column dictates a sudden huge increase in whitespace. But I realize how much it comes down to personal aesthetics, so I wish we could all just coexist :)
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Yeah, I’ve been messing around with similar ideas, see https://nick.zoic.org/art/waste-web-abstract-syntax-tree-editor/ although it’s only vapourware so far because things got busy …
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You can’t convert to elastic-tabstop style from that, and without heavy language-grammar knowledge you can’t do this for 4-space “tabs” generally.
Every editor ever supports this for traditional indent style, though: http://intellindent.info/seriously/
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To be clear, you can absolutely render a file that doesn’t have elastic tabstops as if it did. The way a file is rendered has nothing to do with the actual text in the file.
It’s like you’re suggesting that you can’t render a file containing a ton of numbers as a 3D scene in a game engine. That would be just wrong.
Regardless, my point is specifically that this elastic tabstops thing is not necessary and hurts code readability more than it helps.
The pefantics of clarifying between tabs and tabstops is a silly thing as well. Context gives more than enough information to know which one is being talked about.
It sounds like this concept is creating more problems than it solves, and is causing your editor to solve problems that only exist in the seveloper’s imagination. It’s not “KISS” at all, quite the opposite.
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Because presentation isn’t just a function of the AST. Indentation usually is, but alignment can be visually useful for all kinds of reasons.
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It’s in my category of things which are an interesting idea, but which should be a tablet app instead of a piece of hardware.
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Yep, been doing this for years in LaTeX documents and now markdown (etc), it makes a big difference to the readability of diffs and after a while I found it felt natural to read in that form, a bit like reading dialog in a book.
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Uh, that Tesla screen. I got to see one in person, it looks even worse.
No idea what it’s like when driving, they declined my offer to swap for my ‘96 Toyota Hilux despite the Hilux’s clearly superior dashboard ergonomics.
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I rarely ever care about progression of time and version, and the author doesn’t make a good case for why I should in the case of FreeBSD. It seems like a very fussy distinction.
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At first I thought I was going to miss svn “r1234” numbers and considered putting a server-side update hook on a central server there which automatically tagged pushes to ‘master’ with.
I never ended up feeling the need, but given it’s just a few lines of bash perhaps it’d be worth trying and see if people use the sequential numbers or if they’re just a distraction.
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There’s an argument that the really good thing about docker is not in fact docker itself, but Dockerfile. By standardizing on a description for containers, you can now implement containers in whatever way you want, over zones / jails / namespaces or virtual machines, and they’ll work the same.
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Sounds like the C version of English As She Is Spoke
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My wife teaches English and will really appreciate this. Thanks!
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This type of naive translation is really common. A personal favourite
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In terms of desktop adblocking and tracking blocking solutions, I use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and this hosts file.
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I use uBlock Origin as well, works like a charm! Just have to disable font blocking on a few pages for them to be readable.
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It could be historically quite interesting I suppose. No sign of it under https://github.com/universityofadelaide yet though.
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Yeah, I had a play with this a while ago and it works pretty well: in a field trial among ~20 mostly non-tech friends, only one noticed that there was no way to set a password.
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One of your comments is that cookie security wasn’t taken seriously. Could it be the case that you can include in the cookie a per-browser fingerprint as well as a key, and then use a HMAC to hide this information and ensure the authenticity and integrity.
If an attacker were to steal the cookie, the server could identify that even though the secret is valid, the browser has changed significantly enough (cookie theft in the positive case, a sufficiently serious upgrade in the negative case) and force a new login for the browser?
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A lot of the “Unix way” stuff is kinda homoiconic, with the underlying data structure being lines of text in files. Sometimes, lines can be further divided by whitespace. There’s heaps of tools based around this, like ‘wc’, ‘awk’, ‘grep’ and ‘cpp’.
C is an odd case, because it with
readlineit is quite easy to write C code which manipulates C code in a very limited way. Thus the limitations of cpp’s macros. It seems like a shame that the most basic ‘file’ isn’t a more flexible data structure. But that’s a rant for another day :-)
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Jie Qi and Bunnie Huang use audio transfer for programming microcontrollers in the paper electronics Chibitronics project
https://chibitronics.com/programming-chibi-chip/
Bunnie’s LCA2018 talk goes into how they decided this was the best option for beginners and kids to program MCUs, and some of the technical implementation: https://youtu.be/alssfVGrFhI
(Discussion of audio transfer starts about 27:20 but whole talk - covering a lot of things - is worthwhile.)
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Hiya Gus :-)
Yeah, I think the way they’re doing it has some hair on it, but overall it is maybe a good idea. I’d like it better if it used a more modern modulation technique. If it’d work just by holding the clip near a speaker instead of needing a little custom cable it’d be better for kids & iphone owners.
Kinda reminds me of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink#Wireless_data_transfer_mode
It’s kind of a pity IRDA didn’t really take off … would be perfect for this kind of thing.
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Fancy seeing you here, @nickzoic :)
I think the challenge is doing more complex modulation (and/or noise cancellation) without a lot of hardware resources (probably easier if it was MCU->PC rather than the other way around.)
That Timex trick is neat! I wonder how fast I can modulate the backlight of my laptop at, without noticing…
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I would love to be able to run just a web browser on my old iPad 2 … it is a perfectly good device but unusably slow with recent IOS …
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I still really like the idea of Firefox OS as 99% of what I use my phone for could be adequately done in HTML5 apps, if only people could bring themselves to write decent HTML5 apps.
The remaining 1% of things needs a phone dialer API and an SMS send/recv API and we’re done there too.
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Since we’re doing hot lobster takes this morning: I don’t think investigating who MalwareTech was was irresponsible or dumb, it makes a difference to the story if it turns out they are a rival hacker gang, for example, or some hazy Illuminati front.
However, once they worked out that it’s a young person who was curious and lucky, they should have treated him as a source to be protected, not a scoop to be published.
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I don’t think publishing someone’s identity beyond “rival hacking group” is necessary though. Knowing their real name, age, and day job doesn’t change the story to you, the reader. Maybe the media learns it, but they’ve been dealing with anonymity in sources forever. There was absolutely no reason to publish any of his personal information beyond the “security researcher” part.
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The problem here isn’t that he is doxxed, but that a man is somehow in danger because he stopped a malware from continuing to damage people’s lives and properties and that the societal arm responsible for protecting its citizens isn’t effective enough to give him peace of mind.
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nickzoic
1 year ago
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link
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Windows; unsandboxed highly privileged JavaScript interpreter is used to evaluate untrusted code
Why on earth …? What possible sense is there in executing untrusted code, even if your sandbox is perfect what can you hope to learn?
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I love the idea, but
Uncaught ReferenceError: Z80_fast is not definedfor me on Firefox 53.0 / Linux and Chrome 58.0 / Linux … -
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I’ve been collecting links to similar projects for some time on Pinboard; if this is your project, we should compare notes
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This looks really interesting, if you’ve got a link to your pinboard thing that’d be great too.
I’ve been playing around a bit with the idea of non-texteditor web guis, trying to work out how to get the keyboard bindings right so they don’t become a pain. I got as far as writing up a s-expression editor, with the intention of working up to JSON and eventually Javascript or Python.
I like the idea of moving away from code as a text file format … there’s a lot of reasons why it’s difficult but I think it’s worth exploring.
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It’s Jonathan Edwards’ work. I don’t think he has an account on Lobsters.
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My contribution to this genre: http://nick.zoic.org/art/squilla-http-serving-up-stored-procedures/
https://nick.zoic.org/ … a fair bit of Python, MicroPython, IoT kind of stuff.
Doesn’t actually have an RSS feed right now, I probably should fix that.
OK, so now it has an RSS feed.