I am not the parent you reply to, but see my previous reply for the capabilities you miss in 'dumb' editors.
"here is nothing about a text streams that prohibit tools from understanding whatever language you're writing in"
Well it might be true that you can deduce the language of some text stream but you need to make a big step in order to interpret it. You are talking about a compiler. Well a compiler takes a compilation unit, not some stream of text. To infer the semantics of a program the program needs to be present, not a part of it. Granted, a program might be broken up in independent modules, of course.
Make no mistake, a 'dumb' editor like sublimetext could understand a php symfony or a java struts project, if it would get the same analysis tools available in eclipse for example. It could be done, but it is massively more difficult than just running a syntax highlighter and running a rough tagger on some text. Its sad because I believe that fast, slim, editors that know as much as a massive IDE is the best of both worlds.
I have seen the code for eclipse -- there is so much dancing, it's a miracle that handling a key press eventually completes in some time.
> I have seen the code for eclipse -- there is so much dancing, it's a miracle that handling a key press eventually completes in some time.
In many IDE's it barely does, I've had issues with Eclipse, Visual Studio and IntelliJ at some point regarding input latency or the total freeze of the UI while it tries to handle magic with my input in the background.
Visual Studio has gotten progressively better since VS2010, especially with Roslyn; IntelliJ-based products have made strides since IDEA 13 where they really started to focus on input latency; Eclipse was never quite as bad, but it's a pain to use compared to VS or IntelliJ so it's irrelevant that it freezes 10% less in my eyes.
Text editors do have this though, YouCompleteMe for instance does semantic analysis on several languages to generate its completions (using different backends, like Clang or Jedi). Some of the Haskell plugins for Vim and Emacs are also downright amazing with the sort of code analysis and even code derivation they can do right in the editor.
"Make no mistake, a 'dumb' editor like sublimetext could understand a php symfony or a java struts project, if it would get the same analysis tools available in eclipse for example."
"here is nothing about a text streams that prohibit tools from understanding whatever language you're writing in"
Well it might be true that you can deduce the language of some text stream but you need to make a big step in order to interpret it. You are talking about a compiler. Well a compiler takes a compilation unit, not some stream of text. To infer the semantics of a program the program needs to be present, not a part of it. Granted, a program might be broken up in independent modules, of course.
Make no mistake, a 'dumb' editor like sublimetext could understand a php symfony or a java struts project, if it would get the same analysis tools available in eclipse for example. It could be done, but it is massively more difficult than just running a syntax highlighter and running a rough tagger on some text. Its sad because I believe that fast, slim, editors that know as much as a massive IDE is the best of both worlds.
I have seen the code for eclipse -- there is so much dancing, it's a miracle that handling a key press eventually completes in some time.