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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

> The command line will never die. It's precise. It works. If you don't know how to use it, you're not a programmer. End of story.

Precision would match the input to the output. Why should the tool I use to make Python, JS etc ever produce something that's not parseable by the interpreter for those languages? Why should people ever miss a bracket? Especially when they're learning.

Vim has shortcuts for yankingaand deleting and putting lines and paragraphs, which have little meaning in programming. You can't delete a block, or a statement.

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You can do exactly what you are describing (and more!) with ParEdit:

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3998

It's really a killer feature when writing any Lisp. I would love to have something similar for C-style languages, but the more complicated syntax makes it harder.

Being able to manipulate language-sensitive components is very handy; being restricted to manipulating them can be mind-bogglingly annoying... for people, the source text is also a text.

Structure editors were super trendy ... like 25 years ago. There's a good reason they've pretty much died out...

Why would it be annoying to not be able to write invalid code?

Source is not free text, that's provable by needing a parser. Much in the same way the DOM isn't HTML, a lesson already learnt the hard way in web development.

My statement isn't based on pontificating, it's based on lots of people writing structure-editors and everybody hating them.

Despite the end-goal being a correct parse-tree, it turns out that making it impossible to have intermediate "incorrect" states feels very constricting, and people don't like it. The surface text representation may be an irrelevant detail to the compiler, but it's not to humans.

[A lot of the research was aimed at beginners, without previous programming/editor experience, who probably have the most to gain from such assistance (no missing semicolons!), and no prior habits to unlearn. But even there, structure-editors were not popular.]

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