Here's a problem: anyone who's ever used Microsoft Word has experienced random invisible bits of formatting stuck in the text somewhere, difficult to extricate, impossible to replicate, impossible to script. Anyone who's used GUI tools to edit data for long periods of time has experienced actions that are hard to perform in bulk-- that might be scriptable with some complicated API, true, but that would have been trivial to perform if the underlying data was in a text file, probably ending up as some search-and-replace.
If what I'm editing is not the original data, it had best be a perfect, 1:1 representation of that data; I should be able to edit any part of it with a regex without the fear of losing data or missing some annotation I can't see. Certainly in the case of an editor designed for programmers, that will mostly be true-- but there's a good chance that it won't be completely true, and then suddenly the editor is getting in my way and wasting my time.
I don't want to fight against technology. With current editors, I can get pretty much the same functionality, but all the metadata required to colorize text, tab complete, jump to definition, refactor, navigate by s-expr, etc. is just a cache, not something I have to think about.
"Microsoft Word has experienced random invisible bits of formatting stuck in the text somewhere"
In following the links to the paper on Femke, I found in that paper this expansion of the acronym Femke: "emphfunctional micro kernel experiment". I had to look at it a while before I realized that the markup had leaked into the result.
Then I though that "emphfunctional" might just be a very useful neologism, perhaps one that well describes the primary article's idealistic shell, but I'm not sure what it should mean yet.
These are the questions that plague the mind that is having trouble focusing on its work.
If what I'm editing is not the original data, it had best be a perfect, 1:1 representation of that data; I should be able to edit any part of it with a regex without the fear of losing data or missing some annotation I can't see. Certainly in the case of an editor designed for programmers, that will mostly be true-- but there's a good chance that it won't be completely true, and then suddenly the editor is getting in my way and wasting my time.
I don't want to fight against technology. With current editors, I can get pretty much the same functionality, but all the metadata required to colorize text, tab complete, jump to definition, refactor, navigate by s-expr, etc. is just a cache, not something I have to think about.
p.s. this is why I hate Xcode project files.