On Nov 8, 2005, at 5:03 PM, Soryu wrote:
/me and Brian Lalor are currently working on the Java Syntax a bit.
As the original author of the Java syntax, I'm actually pretty happy with it. :-) I think the *syntax* is pretty solid, but a lot more work could be done with commands, macros and snippets. I added quite a bit more syntactical sugar to the syntax yesterday (and I'm hoping it doesn't make things too slow, but so far so good). From my perspective (and I haven't talked to Soryu about his goals yet), the only thing missing is the listing of methods in the symbol pop-up. I'm looking at a BNF description of the Java language right now and I understand what needs to be done, but it makes for a fairly hairy regexp.
Aside: can regexps be commented, like in PHP code?
If one is new to a language on the other hand, a nice little editor and writing all the code from hand is a good way to learn the language, so one learns what he is doing instead of eclipse doing it for him.
I abhor IDEs in general. They take too much focus away from the act of writing code, in my opinion. I've lost too much productivity by having to resuscitate my development environment when something goes screwy. Incremental compilation and method lookup is grand; some kind of method lookup would be fantastic in TM, but I fear it would be a huge amount of work. Javadoc in Safari does the trick nicely for me. :-)
I'm with Soryu: talk it up, folks!