Editor Revolution

It’s interesting when you look at things in technology. We are looking at DNA and finally having a good understanding of what it does. We’re building private companies that are sending things into space. We’re revolutionizing battery technology. And yet, a lot of the developers are still using a traditional text editor.

Our Tools Are Lacking

Sure we have shortcuts to delete lines and move around quickly, but in the end, it’s still a text editor. We use these tools every single day of our lives, so they should be beautiful tools.

IDEs come closer, but there are a considerable amount of things that are simply easier to manage elsewhere.

Until recently. Inspired by a bunch of things recently, we’re starting to see tools like Light Table and Brackets.io spring up. And believe me, we are going to see some awesome things in the future.

As developers, our goal is to solve problems.

One thing that I’ve learned from using Rails is that your tools matter. At the end of the day I’m building a website. I’m interested in the business logic behind the application. How it does what it does. What I’m not interested in, nor should I be, is authentication, the database abstraction layer, the list goes on.

We’ve witnessed the same thing in programming languages. There are plenty of people who don’t need to worry about memory usage. They don’t need to go in and manually delete memory allocations. They don’t need pointers, etc. And so, scripting languages came into play.

Looking Forward

Programmers are quickly becoming more diverse. There are people you would never imagine jumping into software these days. They can handle a little PHP here and there, but they’re not developers by trade. They have ideas to solve their problems we could never imagine as full-time developers.

Hardcore developers will do what they do, but we need to open up development to non-programmers as much as we can. After all, they are the ones that technology can help the most. Better tools, means better solutions.

Light Table and Brackets are awesome steps in the right direction. Who cares where your code is saved when your editor can find them for you? Tools that can stay out of our way, manage our code, and let developers focus on business logic is where we are heading. And it is extremely exciting.