Idea for the day, why not use a wiki as an integrated development environment (IDE)?
I.e. write code in the wiki, configure the build similarly, i.e. which pages will be compiled. Modern wiki’s have configuration management built in, so bye bye svn, git etc. (ok, wiki’s don’t handle this well enough, but again this is an idea not a real product).
The environment by itself supports cross linking, so it self documents and people find it easy to document! The compiler and automated tests can update a build/test result page! With a little thought I think a wiki could manage code better than current IDE’s and integrate the social side. I guess execution of code might be an issue, but one which some more thought would overcome. Possibly this could be integrated into Google Wave?
It’s worth some discussion and further thought – Somewhere, off to bed!
This is only a subset of your interesting and radical idea, but re “The compiler and automated tests can update a build/test result page!”; FitNesse is a successful Wiki-based acceptance test environment along those lines: http://fitnesse.org/
Also just heard about this:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm
The codebubbles stuff sounds interesting – Would like a screen shot etc. I see numerous issues with my idea as stated, not that they could be overcome. E.g. is the code/wiki local or remote? May-be the pages are remote and the compile local. What happens re. editing a shared space. I definitely need to ponder some more.
Personally I think developer environments are going to suck up all the social networking ideas over the last few years and go on to add a few new dynamics based around code. Microsoft is even thinking this way: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/codebook/
At work we have recently been looking at how we can integrate actual coding activities into our recruitment process. One aspect is how early in the process we could do this – would it be possible at the phone screen stage, before we meet a candidate face-to-face.
It occurs to me that a Wiki IDE would be a good tool for this kind of assessment – remote collaborative IDE plus useful history / archive features.
Interesting. I think we could make this work, the main questions/issues I have (as noted before) are:
- Would the compilation be local or remote? I personally like the idea of remote.
- How would you indicate dependencies (e.g. file/library) – I guess these are just a type of page link?
If we could annotate links we could easily define the concept of a project and solution etc. Do you see any better ways?
I wonder if we could trial this? Guess we should take the chat off line?