Comment by justinpombrio
13 days ago
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:
let x = 1;
let y = 2;
do_stuff
(let
((x 1)
(y 2))
do_stuff)
Now you say that there's a lot more possible variation in the first case; it could be:
let x = 1; # Rust
var x = 1; # JS
x=1 # bash
And I point out that there's a lot of possible variation in the second case too:
(define x 1) (define x 2) do_stuff
(let (x 1) (y 2) do_stuff)
(let x 1 (let y 2 do_stuff))
There is less syntax with parens. But it's not zero syntax, and you still need to memorize it.
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