IDE WTF
There is certainly room for IDEs to improve. But there's no way we can ever have the level of automation and abstraction that photographers, video editors and other creatives enjoy.<p>Take the photo clone tool mentioned. Why does that work? Because human vision is lossy and forgiving - the difference between 95% correct and 100% correct is around 5%, depending on how closely the person is looking at it.<p>Programming on the other hand... code is either 0% correct or 100% correct. Anything less than 100% correct is <i>broken</i>.<p>Media is also far less complex. How do I know if my video is correct? I simply play it. If there any errors, they are all possible to detect in the minutes it takes to play the video.<p>There will never be an equivalent for code. You can't visualize an arbitrary algorithm over all its inputs - that's undecidable. It's hard enough to see what a function in three variables does, let alone quicksort.<p>The best we can do is have editors for specific tasks. GUI editors, markup editors, etc. For everything else, code is the only option. We can patch the awkwardness with better languages and better IDEs, but it will never, ever, go away.