It's not an either-or. My prediction is that Victor's tools will be an optional layer on top of text-based representations. I'd go as far as to say that source code will always be represented as text. You can always build Visual Studio and IntelliJ and arbitrarily complex representations on top of text. It's just that it takes a lot of engineering effort, and the tools become obsolete as new languages are developed. We HAD Visual Studio for VB; it's just that everyone moved onto the web and Perl/Python/Ruby/JS, and they got by fine without IDEs.
There are people trying to come up with a common structured base for all languages. The problem is that if it's common to all languages, then it won't offer much more than text does. Languages are that diverse.
I don't want to get into a flame war, but Haskell hasn't passed a certain threshold for it to be even considered for the problem of "exploding code base size". That said, the design of C++ STL is basically to avoid the M*N explosion with strong types. It is well done but it also causes a lot of well-known problems. Unfortunately most C++ code is not as carefully designed as the STL.
>I don't want to get into a flame war, but Haskell hasn't passed a certain threshold for it to be even considered for the problem of "exploding code base size".
What threshold?
>It is well done but it also causes a lot of well-known problems.
Like what? And why do you assume those problems are inherent to having types?
There are people trying to come up with a common structured base for all languages. The problem is that if it's common to all languages, then it won't offer much more than text does. Languages are that diverse.
I don't want to get into a flame war, but Haskell hasn't passed a certain threshold for it to be even considered for the problem of "exploding code base size". That said, the design of C++ STL is basically to avoid the M*N explosion with strong types. It is well done but it also causes a lot of well-known problems. Unfortunately most C++ code is not as carefully designed as the STL.