Comment by emilprogviz

5 years ago

Signed up just to say that I've also really, really wanted such a tool since forever. While for example the Jetbrains IntelliJ family of editors has the automatic "inline function" refactoring, they do it by permanently modifying the source code, which is not quite what we want. Like you say, it should be transient!

So I recently made a quick&dirty interactive mock-up of how such an editor feature could look. The mockup is just a web page with javascript and html canvas, so it's easy to try here: https://emilprogviz.com/expand-calls/?inline,substitution (Not mobile friendly, best seen on desktop)

There are 2 different ways to show the inlining. You can choose between them if you click the cogwheel icon.

Then I learned that the Smalltalk editor Pharo already has a similar feature, demonstrated at https://youtu.be/baxtyeFVn3w?t=1803 I wish other editors would steal this idea. Microsoft, are you listening?

My mock-up also shows an idea to improve code folding. When folding / collapsing a large block of code, the editor could show a quick summary of the block. The summary could be similar to a function signature, with arguments and return values.

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emilprogviz

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TeMPOraL  5 years ago

Thank you! I'm favoriting this comment. This is exactly what I was thinking about (+/- some polish)!

In particular, the SieveOfErastothenes() call, which I can inline, and inside the overlay, I can inline the call to MarkMultiples(), and the top-level variable name `limit` is threaded all the way down.

Please don't take that demo site down, or publish it somewhere persistent - I'd love to show it around to people as the demonstration of the tool I'm looking for.

> When folding / collapsing a large block of code, the editor could show a quick summary of the block.

I love how you did this! It hasn't even occurred to me, but now that I saw it, I want to have this too! I also like how you're trying to guess which branches in a conditional won't be taken, and diminish them visually.

EDIT: Also, welcome to HN! :).

  • emilprogviz  5 years ago

    > Please don't take that demo site down, or publish it somewhere persistent

    Feel free to spread the URL around, I plan to keep it online for the rest of my life, or until the feature is available in popular editors - whichever comes first. And if someone wants to mirror the demo elsewhere, it should be easy to do so, since it's client-side only and MIT licensed.

    > Also, welcome to HN! :)

    Thanks! Been lurking here in read-only mode for years, but today I finally had something to contribute.

    • TeMPOraL  5 years ago

      I just finished binge-watching all five of your videos on better programming tools, and I must say, it just blew my mind. Thank you for making them.

      I've been maintaining my own notes on the kind of tools I'd like to have, with hopes to maybe implement them one day, and your videos covered more than half of my list, while also showing tons of brilliant ideas that never occurred to me. I'm very happy to see that the pain points I identified in my programming work aren't just my imagination.

      Also, on a more abstract level, I love your approach to programming dilemmas, and it's the first time I saw it articulated explicitly: when there are two strong, conflicting views, you do a pros/cons analysis on both, and try to find a new approach that captures all the benefits, while addressing all the drawbacks.

      I've sent you an e-mail a while ago, let me know if it got through :). I'll be happy to provide all kinds of feedback on the ideas you described in your videos, and I'd love to bounce the remaining part of my list off you, if you're interested :).

      > today I finally had something to contribute

      That's a first-class contribution. I think you should post the link to your site as a HN submission, using title "Show HN: Ideas for better programming tools" ("Show HN" being a marker that you're submitting your own work).

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