Articles like this one annoy me, because it's easy to diagnose big problems -- here, watch me do it: "Why should compilers choke if you forget a semicolon? If they can diagnose a syntax error, can't they also fix it? Can't functions be smarter about seeing when they're used improperly and tell you while you're writing the code instead of when you're running it? Why can't the code be understandable to anyone who knows English?"
What's hard -- and often impossible -- is fixing those big problems, because a lot of times they're genuinely intractable; and when they're not, they're often so difficult that they might as well be.
So just sitting around and complaining about them sounds insightful, but it doesn't really get anything done. And yeah, I know that they're allegedly working on "fixes" for these issues, but based on the track record so far (LightTable promised all sorts of revolutionary views of what an IDE could be; it's delivered... not a whole lot of revolution), I don't have any faith that Aurora is going to amount to much either.
And I don't want to be too negative, because sometimes a previously-intractable problem turns out to now be tractable, and it takes someone who was willing to question long-accepted pain to find that out. So I'd be pleasantly surprised if this project delivered something that had even as much effect as the development of, say, git or xunit. But I'm not holding my breath.
What's hard -- and often impossible -- is fixing those big problems, because a lot of times they're genuinely intractable; and when they're not, they're often so difficult that they might as well be.
So just sitting around and complaining about them sounds insightful, but it doesn't really get anything done. And yeah, I know that they're allegedly working on "fixes" for these issues, but based on the track record so far (LightTable promised all sorts of revolutionary views of what an IDE could be; it's delivered... not a whole lot of revolution), I don't have any faith that Aurora is going to amount to much either.
And I don't want to be too negative, because sometimes a previously-intractable problem turns out to now be tractable, and it takes someone who was willing to question long-accepted pain to find that out. So I'd be pleasantly surprised if this project delivered something that had even as much effect as the development of, say, git or xunit. But I'm not holding my breath.