(2016-04-28) Jones Programming With And In Wiki

Phil Jones on Programming With And In Wiki. Update : CardiganBay is my platform for experiments in this direction. Now allows ClojureScript to be embedded etc.

Increasingly the PainOfProgramming comes from managing such rigid development environments. Think of the multiple files we manage, in different languages, in different file systems. The XML configuration files. The SQL scripts to build databases etc.

Now imagine all these different files replaced by WikiPages.

At the moment WE do the hard job of arranging things for the environment. But a make script could easily crawl a Wiki picking up various pieces of code, data in order to build source files, config files, etc.

Why do this? One reason is a kind of literate programming, but instead of embedding comments in code, embed code in free-form wiki pages. The wiki or hypertext nature of the collection of object descriptions would give the language the ease of organization and refactorability of wiki. Something I think would be a big improvement over other development environments.