Programming on an already full brain
Christopher Henry Fry · Communications of the ACM · 1997
use the computer's brain instead.Emacs Menus is an adjunct to the Emacs text editor presenting the programmer with context-sensitive menus containing options that are at least syntactically and typewise legal for the code under the mouse.Emacs Menus, not a commercial product, was written by the author during the past few years in Boston.Most debugging tools concentrate on finding and fixing relatively infrequent deeper bugs, such as errors in algorithms.But in practice, too much time goes to edit-compile-debug cycles for minor bugs, such as typos and "brainos," use of "kill" instead of "delete," or reversal of the order of two arguments to a function.By catching these problems in the editing stage, Emacs Menus speeds programming's inner loops.