April 17, 2017
Representing programs in plain text is extremely useful, but there are often tedious, error-prone editing tasks that detract from the more creative and interesting parts of the programming process. A couple of approaches have helped mitigate this problem. On one hand, structured editors help eliminate classes of syntax errors, but often require a workflow that is quite different than working with plain text. On the other hand, many IDEs augment text with automated refactorings. As the number of refactorings grows, however, complicated hierarchies of menus make it increasingly hard to identity and invoke a desired transformation.
The goal of this work is to enable a workflow that enjoys the benefits of both approaches. Specifically, programs ought to be represented in plain text for familiar and flexible editing by expert programmers, and the editing environment ought to provide automated support for a variety of structured code transformations without deviating from the text-editing workflow.
Earlier versions of Sketch-n-Sketch introduced features for directly manipulating the output of a program. This release (v0.6.0) presents Deuce, a lightweight structured editor for directly manipulating the program text, with automated transformations that perform a variety of programming tasks that are tedious and error-prone with text-edits alone. Here are some videos to demonstrate the new features (also available as a YouTube playlist).
NOTE: This video is not narrated.