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A comment on So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014). Parent comment

Re:So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014) by psyc on Friday May 19, 2017 @12:51PM (#14377409)
Yes, this is definitely what I'm getting at. I do think it would be amazing for education, but also for real work. The Unity Editor, and other similar WYSIWYG game editors, are kind of half-way between tools like Maya and programming environments. Other than being buggy and disorganized, the idea of it is amazing. They let you view "the program" from the 3rd person, as a visual object, inspect and edit state, etc. The productivity gains are real, IMO.

I think the approach generalizes, in principle, to all systems, including the real-world concerns in your second paragraph. Certainly it would be non-trivial. Still, if I ever have the free time, it's about the only thing I'd want to work on.

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Re:So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014) by scrumper on Friday May 19, 2017 @01:15PM (#14377625)
One place to start could be the debugger. This at least has the advantage of a fixed call stack at any point of inspection rather than a whole cloud of possibilities, making drawing some of those call graphs and flows much easier.

I agree, I think it'd be really useful for real work, particularly maintenance work and ramping up on established code bases.

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