Comment by rscho
13 days ago
I run emacs, so I messed around with paredit and friends.
I can understand your pov as a professional coder, doing enough coding that you can really master the syntax of your language of choice. I code occasionally for scientific research, and the less syntax I have to remember, the better. Little syntactic constraint in combination with structural editing really is a killer feature in my context.
paredit is what I think of as a half-structural editor. It gives you some structural shortcuts, but the cursor is still on a character instead of on a node, IIRC. My bet (that I've spent a lot of time building an editor for) is that the big gains will come when the cursor is never on text, always on an AST node.
> the less syntax I have to remember, the better
Part of my point is that parenthetical languages don't actually have that much less syntax. You have to remember one of these two syntaxes:
Now you say that there's a lot more possible variation in the first case; it could be:
And I point out that there's a lot of possible variation in the second case too:
There is less syntax with parens. But it's not zero syntax, and you still need to memorize it.