OT: Programmers whos first language is not English

[Stephen Horne]

On Sat, 08 Mar 2003 12:26:17 -0500, Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters
<mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:

>Stephen Horne <intentionally at blank.co.uk> wrote previously:
>|In particular, I'm thinking of using XML - not as an AST
>|representation, but merely as a way of marking up source code. This
>|would require special editors, of course, but if WYSIWYG editors can
>|be created for HTML I don't see why programmers are still stuck in the
>|plaintext age.
>
>I would say that any programming language that requires a special
>editor is a truly dreadful idea that will die a deservedly early death.
>Either that, or it will be Lisp, and require emacs :-).

Once upon a time, people thought that programmers should only ever
need line editors. Before that, they thought they should only need hex
editors. Before that, they thought they should only need to set a bank
of switches and push a button to latch each byte directly into memory
- or use a card punch or whatever.

>With HTML, as with every other format, most tools that try to create a
>friendly face on the underlying source are awkward, buggy, do everything
>except the thing -you- have to get done, and will not run on whichever
>platform you need to work on.  I cannot work with HTML outside of a
>plaintext editor at any length, nor would I want to.

I've used several HTML editors that worked fine, at least for the
kinds of facilities I'd want to reproduce. Word seems to work fine
without expecting users to understand its binary files, and Open
Office does the same with its zipped XML files funnily enough.

>P.S. That's not to say that allowing a few Unicode keywords is such a
>terrible idea.  It does require an editor that can deal with them, but
>that is -less- specialized than editing XML; and there's more reason for
>general tools to allow that.

Is it a bad thing that Delphi, C++ Builder etc provide graphical
editing facilities that go far beyond what could be done with a
plaintext editor?