Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?
Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?
Development environments should help programmers think (but what if most programmers don't want to think?)
Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising.
Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs.
Thanks to hardware performance counters, profilers are now able to profile code with much less impact on performance (eg: no more adjusting timeouts due to profiler overhead). Network debuggers are getting better at decoding traffic and displaying it in a more human readable format (eg: automatic gzip decompression, stream reassembly, etc).
I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps a language with a fundamentally different view of objects, maybe as an ancestry of deltas of state/behavior pairings, somewhat like prototypes but inheriting by versioning and incrementally changing so that state and behavior always match up but still allowing you to revert to a working version. Likely Alan has some better ideas on what sort of language we need.
Maybe there's something about the style I've adopted that lends itself more to hot-editing but it's definitely a tool I'd hate to be without.
It's pretty poor quality listening but you should get the point. You can send me an email (see my profile) if you wanted to go through it in more detail.