Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

Re:Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer? by inetsee on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @03:26PM (#23469903)

Years ago Interlisp (does anybody here remember Interlisp?) had a function called DWIM (AKA Do What I Mean). It was an (optionally enabled) part of the REPL. If you typed something that made no sense, DWIM would try to figure out what you really meant to type, and offered to run the corrected command.

I have often wondered why that functionality disappeared, and why no one has tried to resurrect it. Search engines offer corrections all the time; why doesn't bash?

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Re:Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer? by bitwize on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @03:53PM (#23470180)

Quaxity quuxity,

Teitelman's Interlisp

Has a DWIM feature that's

Really a screw;

MACLISP has evident

Superiority

Letting its customer

Mean what he do.

--The Great Quux (Guy L. Steele)

This poem indicates the frustrations that hackers had with DWIM at the time, which may explain why no one tried to resurrect it. Too-clever-by-half features intended to help tend to drive people nuts, especially when they fail. Even when they succeed, they interrupt the user's flow and become like that dialog box Windows users just dismiss.

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Re:Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer? by reificator on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @08:30PM (#23472584)

https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck

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Re:Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer? by abhiyerra on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @03:36PM (#23470006)

Zsh has this. But it mostly drives me mad.

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