[erlang-questions] [ANN] Brim - HTML templating library

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 16/03/2012, at 1:17 AM, Michael Turner wrote:

> 
> Dan Halbert pioneered PBE at Xerox PARC. It was later taken up as a
> research project at at Apple. Then it was championed by none other
> than Melinda Gates, at Microsoft.
> 
> It never took off.

No?  There are programmers who swear by "Intellisense" and similar automatic
completion whizz-bang in their IDE.  One of the Smalltalk systems I use,
Pharo, does this.  I swear *at* it, but that's another story.  The web browser
I mainly use offers an autocomplete list when I start to type a URL.  Unlike
Pharo, this doesn't visually obscure what I'm trying to type, so I just use it,
and don't swear at it.  Start typing a query in the Google box, and again an
autocomplete list pops up (but NOT in the way!) and very handy it is.

That's small-scale programming by example.

I don't know what key it is that I'm pressing by mistake, but it seems as if
every time I have to use vim and want to quit I end up in macro recording and
have to spend a long time finger-dancing on the keyboard just to quit.  Macro
recording is precisely programming by example.

The thing that Windows victims got unhappy about was *not* the system watching
what they were trying to do and getting *ready* to be helpful about it but the
system seizing control.  If Clippy had stayed entirely off the screen unless
and until people pressed a special Ctrl-Alt-Help chord, it would still be here.

I had to use Explorer the other day on someone's netbook, and I started typing
a URL and it seized control from me, saying in effect, "no, I know better than
you what you want, you really want to go to your home page, and to prove how
much better I know than you do, I'm going to delete your typing."  PBE is not
the problem, interfering is the problem.