Re^3: Programming *is* much more than "just writing code".

[samizdat]

I agree with you completely, BrowserUK, but especially with two points (my paraphrasing):

• The best course of action in examining code is to strip out everything but code and format it consistently.
• Documentation should be detailed and use every tool we humans have come up with for enhancing readability.

I, too, am a fan of Literate Programming, though I have yet to find the right tool to give me both views of a project. We should be able to switch between pure-code view and documentation view at will, without the messy comment-stripping and PerlTidy steps in the middle. Even better, I'd like three views: pure code, syntax-highlighting with hyperlinked definitions and where-used lists, and documentation view with full text enhancement. Ed Ream's Leo is a step in the right direction, but it isn't all the way there. Mindmaps have documentation advantages, too, as do some CASE environments. I think doxygen is also a great example of the direction we should be heading in this arena. The Xerox PARC Star environment (also Smalltalk/V, Squeak, etc.) with classes and clickable browsers also had excellent usability features, although Smalltalk, the language, was a syntactic mess.

We have powerful computers these days, with incredibly powerful graphics. I grew up with 7-segment displays and a hex keypad, and I spent much of the first half of my career burning EPROMS on microcontrollers. I have come to believe that, no matter what the ultimate target, fancy IDEs that enhance the programming (and debugging) experience are essential to rapid and effective code development. The need grows exponentially more urgent as teams expand and the underlying hardware, OS, and system interfaces become more complex and critical.