The Ultimate Development Environment

What would be the ultimate development environment?

After getting the Hardware for the Ultimate Development Workstation and the Ultimate Programming Language, you need the Ultimate Development Environment.

The Basic Environment

There's one thing I've always liked about Emacs -- it's very very scriptable (for those not familiar with Emacs, all of its functionality can be accessed from the scripting language ELisp, so you can write little add-ons, or whatever). This is a great idea. If I didn't dislike some other aspects of Emacs so much, this alone would be enough to make me use it.

But now, imagine an environment which was scriptable in any Parrot-based language; Perl6 on Parrot, PHP on Parrot, Python on Parrot, LISP on Parrot, even APL, XPath, and Editfiles on Parrot.

Of course, all this is no good without some sort of GUI. While I'd hope there'd be a text-based interface (much like Emacs, vi, nano, etc), I'd also hope there'd be a GUI version (like Eclipse).

Code/Data Editors

Of course, we want a syntax highlighting environment, with tab-completion; tabs at the start of a line indent, tabs elsewhere complete. This would be useful for code (ie. Java, C, Perl), but also for data files (ie. XML).

But there should be other editors as well. One nice thing would be a multi-dimensional array editor which acts much like a spreadsheet, but will allow any language to be embedded in its cells. A default type should be set for the array, but cells should have markers to indicate whether they're code (to be used in an eval, presumably) or data. A default programming language should be specified for the array too.

Where to next?

Setting up an environment like that could result in all kinds of wonderful things. For example, if the multi-dimensional array editor were given a few extra features, it'd be possible to backend it on to a database. If some sort of graphical or typesetting system were attached, it'd be possible to have a very programmable word processor, programmable not just in Basic, but in any Parrot-based language.

I'll write the next article when I've finished drooling :).