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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

Having an environment such as one Victor styled for big systems (big as in millions of lines of code), would prove unfeasible (hell auto-complete has a hiccup when lines start getting into hundreds of thousands).

Those tools he proposes seem to be very beginner and RAD oriented (even if he claims otherwise). I've seen IDE's choke on smaller code bases and this not only has auto-complete, auto-update but also state/frame/time tracking built into. There is no way in hell it can work for existing languages. Maybe some kind of VM that remembers all it's previous states, all function call times, orders and then updates them as programmer changes them.

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Why do systems need millions of lines of code?

If you can build a complete operating system + major programs in 20,000 lines of code, what system should need a million?

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf

(They're not quite down to 20,000 yet, but they're getting there)

No one said they need millions lines of code. However a large "enterprise" application have a way of growing like cancer. This tool won't be particularly useful for such codebases.

if you had this tool, maybe you wouldn't built applications that way anymore. it's at least a possible outcome.

Yes, in a large system, many of Victor's techniques might only be usable in isolatable areas, like well-mocked unit-tests.

Regarding "some kind of VM that remembers all its previous states", check out 'Omniscient Debugging': http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/

We just need to design better IDEs and languages. Ya, large code bases suck but not that much. We can actually compile code pretty quickly, and we are only just beginning to study memoization techniques (which you are alluding to at the end of your post). Also, language is a very big deal: you can't really expect as much from the IDE on C++ as you can from C#.

It can scale, we have plenty of smart people to make it scale. The important problem here is "scale what?" I think that is the genius of Bret Victor's innovations.

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