“Other BBEdit Language Modules”

Rich read the Why I Wrote a JavaScript Module for BBEdit story, but like everyone else at Bare Bones decided to respond to me directly instead of posting something on the site. (Jim Correia has been guilty of this so many times it's now an old joke.) Anyway, he suggests that list the other languages/modules I've added to BBEdit since the JavaScript module

They are, in no particular order:

• Strings (for MacOS X developers)
• Python
• Markdown
• SQL (five flavors)
• Ruby
• Java
• TeX
• Lua
• YAML

My favorite is still the JavaScript module. My least favorite is definitely the Markdown module (see Markdown.pl's source code and look for the author's comment, "This is an aspect of Markdown's syntax that's hard to parse perfectly without resorting to mind-reading" and maybe you'll understand my issues with it.)

My second favorite is the Python module, because Guido van Rossum wrote the gold standard of language specifications. He doesn't just describe the language syntax with near perfect clarity, he also has implementor hints! It's like he was in the room with me when I wrote that module, telling me what I should do here or there. His work made my work better, and there have been very few bugs reported in the Python module since its release.

My second least favorite module is YAML, for the same (or opposite) reason. The specification is obtuse, repetitive, unclear and unrealistic. It's full of internal language which you can only comprehend by looking for definitions elsewhere in the document, and inevitably those definitions have more internal language. (I'm working on an update to the YAML module, and the authors of YAML actually admitted to these problems in several IRC chats we had in the last few weeks).

I have various other unfinished language modules sitting around on my computer, waiting for me to make time for them, but all of the above have been released with BBEdit 8.5, 8.6, or 8.7.