by Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire
“While a lot of the talk surrounding productivity in the HPC space has to do with parallel programming models and language compilers, for coders in the trenches, the most important productivity tool is their text editor. A good source code text editor can make even a poor programming environment seem tolerable. If you doubt the significance of a developer’s relationship with their editor, just suggest he or she ditch their beloved Emacs or vi for Brand X.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by the recent debut of a Web-based text editor, called Bespin, designed for source code development. Bespin is the brainchild of Mozilla Labs, which released a prototype of the tool last week. While there are other online editors like Google Docs and Zoho Writer, those are geared for general-purpose word processing and tend to make poor tools for developing code. The Bespin prototype is geared toward Web programming (it does syntax highlighting for JavaScript, HTML and CSS), but since the editor is built for extensibility, support for other languages should be relatively easy to plug in.”

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