Lambda the Ultimate

Interesting work, but they seem to have forgotten LISP Machines, which, as I've heard but never experienced, had pretty powerful IDE experiences for LISP with structured editing that haven't been matched yet (they never published, and the experience required special hardware so...its basically lost to history). See Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine - Reflections on the Developer Productivity. An understandable hole in the work, but a huge one considering the route they took (one I'm always accused of missing also :) ).

http://shem.io/ to try.

Quote:

1. Macros. We implemented a declarative, statically typed language with S-Expression based syntax using a macro-directed implementation which evolved from the compilation strategy of LISPs. This allowed us to provide the facility for user macros, shown in Section 3.4 , available to extend the syntax of the language. We have already found many examples of useful macros, both for simplifying syntax and dealing with side-effects.

2. Implicit functional dependencies. While functional dependencies are a popular ex- tension of Haskell, they have a negative impact on the complexity of its type system, and have not been included in the base language. We came up with a simplified approach to functional dependencies which is both easier to explain to mortal programmers and, together with the rules our system imposes, does not have a negative impact on type inference completeness or decidability. This mechanism is described in Section 3.5 .

3. Highly polymorphic collections API. Informing the design of our type system, we im- plemented an exhaustive collections library polymorphic in the types of collections, which simplifies their use and removes code duplication by increasing the level of abstraction. This API is described in Section 3.7 .

4. Interactive IDE. In Sections 4.6 and 4.7 we describe the main interface of our IDE and the way in which programmers can freely experiment with programs, including animations and interactive interfaces, and observe their execution. This model works thanks to our language being functional and pure-by-default.

5. Surfacing type errors through origins of types. Although the core of the idea did not originate with us, we took great care in implementing a type system which always reports the origin of errors, even when these are coming from explicit type declarations. Our implementation, detailed in Section 4.8.2 can provide a platform for testing this approach towards type error messaging and potentially informing improvements to current Hindley- Milner style type system implementations.

6. Colorful and powerful syntax. There have been many implicit influences between the language and the IDE design but the single biggest one is the approach to effective syntax. We have shown in Section 3.3.3 that S-Expression based syntax can be made more readable and less verbose through the use of color and that it can be exploited to provide a more powerful editing experience based on the actual AST of the program.

Sentance

The improper spelling of sentence by a high strung person, normally a Republican.

This sentance was misspelled by Mr. Kyle Shook.

Not to be a grammarnazi, but this burns.