Coding in Notepad

Vim is my code editor of choice. But lately I do more and more code writing in Notepad.¹

I find it useful to keep a dated, stream-of-consciousness “project log” for each codebase I’m working on. Last year, I published a few of these (example), written in Markdown. These days, they’re unpublished and plain text, which means I can be even more casual and sloppy in them.

The project log is as much a whiteboard as a journal. In the project log for Gentest, I:

• Pondered how to emulate the Reader monad and/or dynamic bindings in JavaScript.
• Since I didn’t find a good way, investigated how test.check (a library with similar functionality to Gentest, but in another language) handles the underlying situation.
• Wrote pseudocode for a test runner.
• Brainstormed use cases for testing and what interface would best suit each one.
• Realized a potential interface wouldn’t work when I sketched out code using it and saw that certain things weren’t possible.

What I find remarkable about project logs is how often I end up actually running the pseudocode in them. For example, in a recent day’s notes, I wrote:

I think we need some lower-level thing for forAll to sort of desugar to that’s fully programmable.

And maybe what it is is like,

function forAll(args, name, prop) {
  _props.push({
    prop: prop,
    name: name,
    gen: Array.isArray(args) ? gentest.types.tuple(args) :
                               gentest.types.tuple(gentest.types.shape(args))
  });
}

This was just to illustrate a possible solution to a problem. _props didn’t exist; I made it up. There was no module to put this in, no code calling this forAll function. And yet, I copy-pasted this into Vim, made a few changes, and it’s now part of the v0.1.0 release of Gentest.

Writing in a notes file is low pressure. I can go straight from prose to code and back, shrugging off the precise demands of the computer. Using a lightweight editor emphasizes the difference. When I code in Notepad, I’m in a realm of pure thought just as if I were hand-writing in a physical notepad. The computing in computer science fades away and the “science” takes the foreground.

You can follow me on Mastodon or this blog via RSS.

Original text and images (not attributed to others) on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.