News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword... by skohan on Sunday June 14, 2020 @01:22PM (#23519469)
Tools are great, but I'm not a fan of the idea of needing special tooling outside of the source code itself in order to be able to understand it.

Maybe it's just me, but I would hate to imagine living in a world where my projects might be incomprehensible if I ever lost my .vimrc

Re:The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword... by frou_dh on Sunday June 14, 2020 @01:24PM (#23519482)
In this case it would be a pure value-add, because the fallback is the way everyone can evidently cope with anyway.
Re:The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword... by adrianmsmith on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:03PM (#23542094)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. If a large proportion of people use a more advanced development tool, it sort of becomes indispensable, because people design the software to be edited with the tool, such that it becomes difficult to edit it without the tool.

For example if, today, I checked in code like performRequest(request, response, null, null, null) you probably wouldn't consider that good code, as it's not clear what the nulls mean there. Most people today would try to not write code like that. But if everyone was using an editor which displayed the parameter names, then it'd be fine. People would write that code, check it in, and so on. Which would mean that those people without the tool would have to confront such code.