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copied!<p><strong>Source files are <em>SO</em> 20th century.</strong></p> <p>Within the body of a function/method, it makes sense to represent procedural logic as linear text. Even when the logic is not strictly linear, we have good programming constructs (loops, if statements, etc) that allow us to cleanly represent non-linear operations using linear text.</p> <p>But there is no reason that I should be required to divide my classes among distinct files or sort my functions/methods/fields/properties/etc in a particular order within those files. Why can't we just throw all those things within a big database file and let the IDE take care of sorting everything dynamically? If I want to sort my members by name then I'll click the member header on the members table. If I want to sort them by accessibility then I'll click the accessibility header. If I want to view my classes as an inheritence tree, then I'll click the button to do that.</p> <p>Perhaps classes and members could be viewed spatially, as if they were some sort of entities within a virtual world. If the programmer desired, the IDE could automatically position classes & members that use each other <em>near</em> each other so that they're easy to find. Imaging being able to zoom in and out of this virtual world. Zoom all the way out and you can namespace galaxies with little class planets in them. Zoom in to a namespace and you can see class planets with method continents and islands and inner classes as orbitting moons. Zoom in to a method, and you see... the source code for that method.</p> <p>Basically, my point is that in modern languages it doesn't matter what file(s) you put your classes in or in what order you define a class's members, so why are we still forced to use these archaic practices? Remember when Gmail came out and Google said "search, don't sort"? Well, why can't the same philosophy be applied to programming languages?</p>

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