If you're suggesting we all switch to writing APL then I'm probably in agreement with you :) but I still think you're partially undervaluing and partially misunderstanding the full potential of IDEs.
>Can you think in terms of what a JetBrains codebase will look like after you refactor it, without actually doing the refactoring and seeing the result? How about with two or three such applications in play?
Not sure what you mean here, IDE built-in refactorings are tools that I use because I know exactly what I want to do and what the codebase should look like after I do it, but the work to get there is tedious and repetitive. I have never had trouble imagining how they work or what the result will be. Compilers do optimizations that alter the structure of programs reliably; an IDE with a language model as rich as the IntelliJ suite's is little different from a compiler specialized to a few high-level optimizations.
>Programming languages and (symbolic) mathematics are both formal languages. You manipulate them algebraically, by moving the symbols around, applying transformations that turn one valid statement into another valid statement.
We seem to think about programming languages very similarly. Always nice to find a fellow traveler ;)
I'm not really a fan of Java though I will confess to liking C# a lot. My heart is with OCaml and Idris though. So why do I program in C#? Why do I choose such a "high-friction" language, as you put it? C# is most definitely not designed from the ground up for maximum developer ergonomics.
It's because of the ecosystem, and specifically tooling like the JetBrains IDEs. I'm more productive in a language like C# because of the depth of high-quality libraries available to me and the quality of the tooling I use. Yes, some of the worth of an IDE is in papering over ergonomic problems in languages. However, IDEs are certainly not required to write code in these verbose languages. I use them because they are powerful tools that are well adapted to the conceptual model of the languages they support, and they enhance my ability to use patterns and write code "fluidly" as you put it.
Even in more ergonomic and expressive languages this has value, probably even more than it has in C# or Java. These languages are easier to write without an IDE, but we don't know what we're missing because the high-quality tooling just doesn't exist. Idris' Atom support is a pointer in the direction I'm thinking of: https://atom.io/packages/language-idris
Just think about what an IntelliJ-level IDE could do for a language with a type system as rich as Idris'. You might be able to infer entire applications based off a handful of expressive type signatures. We have yet to see what writing in one of these languages is like with a suitably powerful design environment, and I fully believe that it will make writing them with a text editor look pedestrian just like IntelliJ did to Java.
I'm not super jazzed about where Scala sits on the syntactic complexity vs expressive power plot. Seems uncomfortably close to C++ from what I've seen of it, although I know that Dotty/Scala 3 is supposed to clean it up quite a bit conceptually.
I think the reputation is wrong there - Scala's syntax is actually very simple and uniform. e.g. a {} block can just be used anywhere to pass a block of statements instead of an expression, rather than having complex rules about which keywords do or don't need braces. Function application can be written without brackets (which I guess some people see as complex, but it's a very shallow kind of complexity) so operators aren't a special case, a + b is just calling the function called "+". If anything Scala 3 feels like a step back in my book - e.g. they've added a bunch of different syntaxes for implicits rather than treating them as a single general feature that can be used for multiple things.
>Can you think in terms of what a JetBrains codebase will look like after you refactor it, without actually doing the refactoring and seeing the result? How about with two or three such applications in play?
Not sure what you mean here, IDE built-in refactorings are tools that I use because I know exactly what I want to do and what the codebase should look like after I do it, but the work to get there is tedious and repetitive. I have never had trouble imagining how they work or what the result will be. Compilers do optimizations that alter the structure of programs reliably; an IDE with a language model as rich as the IntelliJ suite's is little different from a compiler specialized to a few high-level optimizations.
>Programming languages and (symbolic) mathematics are both formal languages. You manipulate them algebraically, by moving the symbols around, applying transformations that turn one valid statement into another valid statement.
We seem to think about programming languages very similarly. Always nice to find a fellow traveler ;)
I'm not really a fan of Java though I will confess to liking C# a lot. My heart is with OCaml and Idris though. So why do I program in C#? Why do I choose such a "high-friction" language, as you put it? C# is most definitely not designed from the ground up for maximum developer ergonomics.
It's because of the ecosystem, and specifically tooling like the JetBrains IDEs. I'm more productive in a language like C# because of the depth of high-quality libraries available to me and the quality of the tooling I use. Yes, some of the worth of an IDE is in papering over ergonomic problems in languages. However, IDEs are certainly not required to write code in these verbose languages. I use them because they are powerful tools that are well adapted to the conceptual model of the languages they support, and they enhance my ability to use patterns and write code "fluidly" as you put it.
Even in more ergonomic and expressive languages this has value, probably even more than it has in C# or Java. These languages are easier to write without an IDE, but we don't know what we're missing because the high-quality tooling just doesn't exist. Idris' Atom support is a pointer in the direction I'm thinking of: https://atom.io/packages/language-idris
Just think about what an IntelliJ-level IDE could do for a language with a type system as rich as Idris'. You might be able to infer entire applications based off a handful of expressive type signatures. We have yet to see what writing in one of these languages is like with a suitably powerful design environment, and I fully believe that it will make writing them with a text editor look pedestrian just like IntelliJ did to Java.