> Haystack takes care of the tedious confusing parts of coding
Tedious, yes, but confusing? Yikes!
My job as a coder is to resolve ambiguity favorably. Every day, I strive to leave the world less confusing than I found it. I would no more rely on an IDE to "take care" of confusion than I would outsource my firm's core competencies.
But the main conceit is cool, and I'm sure the dependency graph is helpful. I'm just picking nits with marketing copy. Can't wait to check it out! (Although my first instinct is to check for a canvas plugin for VScode).
Edit: I should say that I think this UI paradigm will fundamentally improve coder understanding by exploiting our visual cortex and "sixth sense" of proprioception, at least as far as I understand it via Supersizing the Mind (Andy Clark, 2008).
I strive for the same thing, but every time surprising new requirements arrive, there's a good chance that the elegant architecture my team created is in conflict with the design we now want. At that point, there is a three step process:
1. Design the new architecture.
2. Gain a full understanding of the existing architecture and all of its trade-offs.
3. Design a way to convert the old architecture into the new architecture.
This happens surprisingly often and it's quite unavoidable. In the past, I tried to avoid redesigning by building things that could be expanded in every conceivable way, but I discovered that over-engineering actually makes it harder to redesign. YAGNI wins!
I've been thinking for a while that a canvas-type editor might help a lot in the process of redesigning. It should help by taking better advantage of spatial memory.
Hmm I think someone else has voiced a similar opinion on the wording here, and I actually do agree with you.
What was meant by this statement is really just taking care of plumbing and the visualization of how code relates to one another.
To give you a very basic/silly example of plumbing, if I add a parameter in a function used in 100s of places, doing the manual work to figure out what edits I need to make to those callers is pretty annoying and in most cases mechanical.
If you're lucky, you can do a grep + replace (or just use a default param), but in most cases I find it requires more manual intervention than that.
Not yet -- it's our vision to automate stuff like that!
> Edit: And "to figure out what edits I need to make" is done by any ol' compiler, no?
Kinda? There are cases where you have to drill data down into the callstack (i.e. pass data from above). There are folks who have gone down this path before: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/resharper/Refactorings__Chang... but we intend to automate it even more and show it to the user in an organized way for them to handle large-scale "refactors".
Tedious, yes, but confusing? Yikes!
My job as a coder is to resolve ambiguity favorably. Every day, I strive to leave the world less confusing than I found it. I would no more rely on an IDE to "take care" of confusion than I would outsource my firm's core competencies.
But the main conceit is cool, and I'm sure the dependency graph is helpful. I'm just picking nits with marketing copy. Can't wait to check it out! (Although my first instinct is to check for a canvas plugin for VScode).
Edit: I should say that I think this UI paradigm will fundamentally improve coder understanding by exploiting our visual cortex and "sixth sense" of proprioception, at least as far as I understand it via Supersizing the Mind (Andy Clark, 2008).