You're focusing on a different part than I was.

My point was that super fancy IDEs and plain old text editors alike could reuse the same tooling and not have to reimplement things like language parsing, analysis, and refactoring tooling.

Libraries like haskell-suite and command-line tooling like ghc-mod have succeeded in that. That ghc-mod happens to be a command-line application is utterly irrelevant to the end-user unless they want to go poking around.

And uh, you know, some people do sometimes.

Want to go poking around that is. Some people like owning and operating their tools.

I'm not saying "Hail Unix", I'm saying, "Hail IDE, Emacs, and Vim hackers not needing to write the same libraries over and over". The specific implementation is irrelevant.

Also if you refuse, on account of bias, to understand why people might find such a design (command-line application invoked from different programming environments to augment functionality) then you are damning yourself to be ignorant of how other people think and work.

This reminds a lot of the hatred some people have for the Twilight series. It's not a product designed to appeal to somebody like me, but clearly there's something to it because it has resonated with millions of people.

Is it really worth it to say "ugh yuck" and not even pause to reflect on what it is about this thing you dislike (Unix-style tooling) that so many other people have stuck with for decades? Are you feeling insecure because the average hacker these days is using a Mac or Linux machine?

>I frankly don't buy the entire interop premise,

I guess you can be that way if you want, but Emacs, Vim, Sublime Text and Eclipse all have Scion integration. Scion isn't quite like ghc-mod, note that I was talking about a general attitude that all IDE tooling should be reusable across multiple environments in Haskell, not just command-line applications.

Scion in this case is:

https://github.com/nominolo/scion

Scion is a Haskell library that aims to implement those parts of a Haskell IDE which are independent of the particular front-end. Scion is based on the GHC API and Cabal. It provides both a Haskell API and a server for non-Haskell clients such as Emacs and Vim.

You'll note that it's not actually a command-line app like ghc-mod. I use ghc-mod because it's "simple" and easily inspectable/dumpable for it's output at the terminal.

I know Emacs and vim users to both use ghc-mod.

buildwrapper mostly replaced Scion and is used by Leksah, Yi, EclipseFP (all IDEs). Buildwrapper provides its functionality via JSON.

Leksah, Yi, and EclipseFP are the primary IDEs Haskell users use, IF they're not using FPComplete's dilly which is web-based and is using the same Haskell IDE tooling as everybody else.

> Haskell has no popular IDE as far as I can tell

I don't really know that "IDEs are popular in Haskell"

but "Haskell has popular IDEs" is true.

Further, while I can't speak for vim users, the way most advanced Emacs users interact with their programming languages, especially Haskell, is an interactive hybrid IDE environment usually built on a REPL.

> How much do C and Haskell share in common?

The fuck are you talking about? I've only been talking about tool-sharing in the Haskell community this whole time.

> so why worry if IntelliJ doesn't share an architecture with Eclipse?

It's troubling because it means labor is wasted writing the same tooling (IDE) for the same language (Java). Hackers should be bothered when their colleagues are writing redundant code.

Maybe that's not an ethos at Microsoft or MSR, but it is in the various open source communities I've been in.

>But as someone who works on IDEs full time, this rosy-tinted glasses belief that we were doing it the right way 30 years ago quickly annoys me.

You clearly have not used Emacs or any of the Haskell tooling I use.

While some Emacs users still use things like etags/ctags, I do not. I have language-aware search/go-to-definition faculties just like any IDE in Emacs. The same goes for most other things I give a damn about. We have the same faculties as anybody else, we simply refuse to give up control over our tools because we don't buy into Microsoft's dystopian digital neo-feudalism.

I don't let that difference of vision cause me to act like a fucking prick to a perfect stranger on HN though. You are representing Microsoft and MSR - and all I've gotten from this experience is that Microsoft employees are totally out of touch with the work anybody else is doing. Unprovocatedly unpleasant to boot.

>...has no popular IDE as far as I can tell; the community just isn't into them (though some exist, like Leksah), which is quite odd to me, as they have all that static type information sitting around!

Haskell users aggressively leverage the types for secondary purposes, you're just not a Haskell user and are therefore ignorant to it. You're still wrong about Haskell users not using IDE-esque workflows, you just don't understand how that can manifest in a different form than being a Visual Studio customer.

>I frankly don't buy the entire interop premise,

I've conclusively demonstrated aggressive tool-sharing across different toolsets in Haskell, even with most people upgrading from Scion to buildwrapper when it became mature. It's rare for open source communities to keep up with each other that well.

> Unix was a great C dev environment, you had ed (later vi and emacs)

The proximity of mentioning ed and vi/emacs in the same sentence is not as clever as you think it is and really just shows how ignorant you are to how vimmers and Emacs users work these days.

My Emacs environment of today would be utterly alien to myself-10-years-ago. Or even 3-5 years ago. Or even 2 years ago. A lot of evolution can happen when you've been improving the same tooling over and over for multiple decades.

Emacs is nearly as old as Bill Gates's DUI arrest (1976 and '75). Do you really think people are using it the same way now as they were then?

I mean, for one thing, it starts up quickly now >:)

You should really try immersing yourself in how Emacs users work these days, you really have no idea at all. It could use a lot of work, so could everything, and there are some things that some IDEs for some languages will do better...but it bears more resemblance to those IDEs than to ed of all things.

The interactive REPL oriented workflow is something IDEs still haven't gotten right though. Pity that.