

A call for source code CSS - lxt
http://www.twobraids.com/2013/05/a-call-for-source-code-css.html

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lowmagnet
It sounds like an editor that works in abstract syntax trees and writes out
screen (styled) and disk (pep 8) representations.

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ilaksh
Yup. And there are editors that work along those lines.

I like the idea but I don't think it goes far enough.

One comment about the thing with the 80 character limit. I would say that it
is less about people's minds working differently than it is about having
different belief systems.

For example, there are a lot of people that grew up learning the belief that
long lines are bad programming practice. And that's how they see the world.

Often what happens is that technologies evolve but our beliefs do not. This is
one example: it used to be very hard to manage editing code with long lines,
simply because editors did not have scroll bars. In that case, it was bad
practice.

However, modern editors have scroll bars.

Now, on to something a little more controversial: it is a near-universal
belief that programming must be authored in a textual language, otherwise it
isn't programming, or cannot be effective.

I believe that this is another belief that has become outdated. In fact, I
believe that source code is the number one thing holding back software
development.

Source code is not a structured data format. It is a textual format where the
presentation and data and together. HTML and CSS separate the presentation
(CSS) from the structure data (HTML).

I actually believe that building web pages and web applications by manually
coding HTML and CSS, even though that is what I do since everyone does it and
it is practical given current tools and belief systems, is very stupid and
based on outdated beliefs.

Back when we started programming, we didn't used to have graphical user
interfaces at all. Therefore, editing programs as text was our only option.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming>

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3033>

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mynegation
That is a good idea! One difference from CSS though is that code presentation
rules should be reversible. E.g. when you author a Python code with more than
79 characters in line, your environment should seamlessly convert it to PEP-8
compliant source before checking it into the repository.

