The way people create programs has not changed much in the last several decades. Developers predominantly use a text-editor when they want to understand a program or write new code. There are two fundamental issues with this way of working with programs. First, textual source files have a limited information capacity beyond which they become unreadable. However, additional meta-data in code would enable new ways to understand code and build more robust applications. Second, a collection of text files is a poor way to think about programs and a text editor’s interface does not map well to the domain of program structure. These two issues stunt the programming experience.

We propose an alternative approach to designing integrated development environments (IDEs) that enables enriching the program source with unlimited meta-information and uses a flexible interface comprised of textual and visual notations that are a better fit for the domain of programming. Our approach opens possibilities for improved development tools and makes it easier for developers to understand code.

At PX we would like to demonstrate four aspects of our approach: (i) rich program presentation and domain-specific customizations; (ii) efficient interactions within the rich presentation; (iii) enhancing code understanding by storing meta-data; and (iv) querying and integrating different information sources directly within the IDE.