[etse]

> why structured editors haven’t taken over the world: most programmers find them so annoying to use in some situations that they don’t view the pros as outweighing the cons.

Seems like "annoying" refers to a user interface annoyance.

I'm guessing the following since I couldn't tell what structured editing is like from the article:

Keyboard entry is immediate, but prone to breaking the program structure. Structured editing through specific commands is an abstraction on top of key entry (or mouse), both of which add a layer of resistance. Another layer might come from having to recall the commands, or if recognizing them, having to peruse a list of them, at least while learning it.

What does the developer's experience with incremental parsing feel like?

[Eliah_Lakhin]

> What does the developer's experience with incremental parsing feel like?

It's essentially the experience most of us already have when using Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or any modern IDE on a daily basis.

The term "incremental parsing" might be a bit misleading. A more accurate (though wordier) term would be a "stateful parser capable of reparsing the text in parts". The core idea is that you can write text seamlessly while the editor dynamically updates local fragments of its internal representation (usually a syntax tree) in real time around the characters you're typing.

An incremental parser is one of the key components that enable modern code editors to stay responsive. It allows the editor to keep its internal syntax tree synchronized with the user's edits without needing to reparse the entire project on every keystroke. This stateful approach contrasts with stateless compilers that reparse the entire project from scratch.

This continuous (or incremental) patching of the syntax tree is what enables modern IDEs to provide features like real-time code completion, semantic highlighting, and error detection. Essentially, while you focus on writing code, the editor is constantly maintaining and updating a structural representation of your program behind the scenes.

The article's author suggests an alternative idea: instead of reparsing the syntax tree incrementally, the programmer would directly edit the syntax tree itself. In other words, you would be working with the program's structure rather than its raw textual representation.

This approach could simplify the development of code editors. The editor would primarily need to offer a GUI for tree structure editing, which might still appear as flat text for usability but would fundamentally involve structural interactions.

Whether this approach improves the end-user experience is hard to say. It feels akin to graphical programming languages, which already have a niche (e.g., visual scripting in game engines). However, the challenge lies in the interface.

The input device (keyboard) designed for natural text input and have limitations when it comes to efficiently interacting with structural data. In theory, these hurdles could be overcome with time, but for now, the bottleneck is mostly a question of UI/UX design. And as of today, we lack a clear, efficient approach to tackle this problem.