[PRL] The Importance of Excel

[Tony Garnock-Jones]

On 02/14/2013 10:58 AM, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
> All of these are development environment (i.e. operating system)
> concerns. It surprises me, but I don't see a lot of work in these areas
> from the PL community.

To be clear, I mean to suggest we need to be developing a "theory of 
IDEs" of similar scope to the theories of such as the lambda-calculus we 
have. The top-level and by extension other IDEs are indeed truly 
hopeless without one.

Our existing theories work very well for programming in-the-small at the 
level of well-specified problems, but work very poorly for 
under-specified or rapidly-evolving problems such as those involving 
living human beings.

A "theory of IDEs" would cover topics such as version control; files and 
directories; debuggers; REPLs and shells; access control; etc. The 
Racket project is of course nibbling at the edges of this topic already.

Tony