On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Laurent PETIT <laurent.pe...@gmail.com>wrote:
> You should probably both share gists of real code you're talking about, > shouldn't you ? > Most of the stuff I'm working on is closed-source. Offhand, I'm not sure what examples I can share, but I'll keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, just to get a feel for whether this is unique to my code or universal, I decided that I was going to carefully scrutinize the nesting level of the next public Clojure code I encountered. Completely randomly, the next Clojure code I encountered was this blog post: http://blog.japila.pl/2012/03/block-scanner-from-let-over-lambda-in-clojure Take a look at how indented the code is after merely 10 lines of code. We start to take this for granted in Clojure, but if you look at it with a fresh eye, it really is ridiculous. > Your discussion made me think that editors may help further in this area, > without having to change the syntax. > Currently, the editors only try to give some "hints" by playing with > colors, but there are some other ideas that could be followed: > - playing with contrast by also using the ability to change the fonts > - playing with contrast by slowly decreasing the font's opacity as the > code gets deeper (but where the cursor is, this should probably go away to > ensure good visibility) => could help see the overall structure without > seeing to much of the details? > - playing with "proximity" by adjusting the line sizes. For example, there > could be extra space around the "true" and "false" clauses of an if, there > could be extra space around "condition/then" clauses of a cond, etc. > - playing with the background color of blocks, potentially minimizing (and > to some extend -in a modal structural editor- almost removing from sight) > the parens > > - since it's not the same thing to "write/edit" and to "read" code, there > could be the possibility to have a "read" mode where the editor could > represent totally differently the source code (think it could even present > it in some sort of prefix-notation :-) ) > > I love these ideas. I think your final comment is especially insightful. I have no problem writing Clojure code, I just find it unnecessarily taxing to read it. The idea of separating the two, and possibly having a read-mode is an absolutely fascinating idea. In some sense, Marginalia is already a good positive step in this direction. The first time I ran Marginalia on my code I was astonished at how much more readable it was to have the comments in a separate column alongside the code, rather than interrupting the code itself. It makes me wonder how many other things could have such a positive, dramatic effect. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
