What I want is for the editor to be aware of the <i>semantics</i> of the language and offer me language-unique tools to edit code, also to generate and work on macros, <i>in the language it's editing</i>, or at least one that is close enough to it I don't have to switch gears in order to get a tough task done.<p>Otherwise it really doesn't improve on a text editor. All of these things would require a ton of work, so I stick with Sublime for now. Text isn't that bad.<p>IDEs are kinda close, but I've yet to see one that could effectively work with dynamic languages. RubyMine is interesting-looking, but seems to want to impose a lot of its opinions on your workflow. I don't really see how RubyMine would really be that much better than Sublime and a terminal.
What is the benefit of this? It seems like oftentimes editing ASTs is much more verbose than code that would generate an AST.<p>For example, in python's builtin ast library, writing the variable<p>> x<p>in AST is..<p>> Expr(value=Name(id='x', ctx=Load()))<p>while assigning the variable<p>> x = 1<p>in AST is..<p>> Assign(targets=[Name(id='x', ctx=Store()),], value=Num(n=1))<p>There is a lot packed in there! I looked at the site, and a few videos, but the goal and motivation for this project has gone way over my head (probably my fault!).
The benefits of AST editors is that the source can be stored and revisioned controlled much better. And the AST can be projected to different visualizations or text representation.
I find myself wanting to edit the textual version of the AST itself, as the tree interface seems too cryptic<p>edit: I'm guessing its probably a bug that is confusing me the most, as I'm getting both a inline tree and a indented tree at the same time for a node
Paredit[1] is (almost) from the gods as an AST editor. The only issue I have is that it doesn't automatically reformat your code so it is not only always syntactically correct, but also properly formatted at the same time.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit" rel="nofollow">https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit</a>
Author here. Added another quick video on Youtube, check this out <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13774829" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13774829</a><p>Guess I need help from someone because English is not my mother language, and I even got cough these days.
reminds me <a href="http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/an_editor_for_composed_programs.html" rel="nofollow">http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/an_editor_for_composed_...</a>
I don't want to be a downer, but the visual presentation is awful, I could not work with the nesting direction changing all the time.<p>If there were a good language-specific pretty printer, and it looked like regular text in the language, I could probably stomach it.