[TxMt] Re: Mathematica (with a bit of TextMate theology as bonus)

[Jacob Rus]

rafale labosk wrote:
> Jacob Rus wrote:
>>> It seems that people have had sporadic success with TM
>>> in the functional space. Someone feel free to correct me.
>> What do you mean?
> 
> This is an unfair statement by me. I am unqualified to
> make this judgement since I have not fully explored
> TM's capabilities. It was a statement based on Lisp
> users' general take on TM, gleaned from friends, blogs
> and random email posts: TM is excellent, but not
> preferred for Lisp, and by extension, I inferred
> Lispish M'ca. But then again, they have a dedicated,
> mature environment that is thoroughly optimized for
> Lisp nuances.

I think that the lisp users in question are likely basing their judgment 
on the lack of existing support from the lisp bundle, rather than on the 
features provided by TextMate.  The lisp-like language bundles (scheme, 
common lisp, etc.) could definitely use use a lot of work, but this has 
more to do with lack of users and contributors than with any particular 
deficiencies of the editor; if you look in the list bundle, it has no 
snippets, commands, or macros, and a 56-line grammar which marks up very 
little (it doesn't even do caar, cadr, etc.).

The scheme grammar is a bit more complex and featureful, but the scheme 
bundle also could use a lot of attention--right now the only thing other 
than the grammar is some commands for running the current script.

To judge how well TextMate can deal with functional languages, take a 
look at the OCaml bundle, and to a lesser extent, the Haskell and Erlang 
bundles, which have had significantly more effort put into them.

I'm really not sure why there are so few TextMate lisp users.  I think 
it must have something to do with most users learning scheme/lisp in 
universities, where professors and teaching fellows with decades-old 
biases train new students.

Though I personally prefer python to ruby, it's very interesting to me 
how ruby's growing popularity and TextMate's have fed off each-other. 
Needing a new editor for ruby and rails, DHH, who was Allan's friend, 
and one of the earliest TextMate beta testers, seized on TextMate as his 
editor of choice.  As a newish language and environment, without the 
decades of refinement in support from other editors, rails was almost 
ideal for demonstrating the ease with which TextMate can be customized. 
  TextMate's rails and ruby bundles leapt up almost overnight, vastly 
outpacing the much-harder-to-customize older editors which are so 
popular for editing languages like lisp.


Incidentally, I would bet that if you look back in another year or two, 
you'll find TextMate quite an excellent environment for lisp hacking.

> Also, off topic, whether people realize it or not, TM
> can be used as a semantic outliner for text. If you
> set up your metadata in the Finder's smart folder
> structure, you can leverage that into tmproj for text
> manipulation. For it to really work, some sort of
> basic sort mechanism in the tmproj pane has to be in
> place. Plus, your text files in tmproj have to be
> small. While I have not tried it, I'm assuming you
> should be able to link text in different files under
> one of the html schemes. This is something worth
> exploring I think.

You'll have to explain this; I can't understand what you mean.  Smart 
folders currently have nothing to do with TM, as far as I know.  What 
metadata are you talking about, what html schemes links, and what tmproj 
pane mechanisms?  None of these ring any bells.

-Jacob