Hal E. Fulton wrote:

> A browser-editor that can do basic
> refactoring (and maybe some source
> control functions). Should of course be
> scriptable in Ruby. Should have some
> kind of template or script support for
> Lapidary or RubyUnit or whatever.

This is an interesting idea... you write tests, and the editor generates 
method and class stubs as you go.  Interesting.  On the other hand, stuff 
like this can get really annoying, in practice, really fast. :-)

> Net-enable it for the purpose of... <drum
> roll please> remote pair programming!
....
> Should have at least a chat box, maybe even
> voice, maybe even webcam.

Yeah, this would be a requirement... otherwise, you aren't really pair 
programming.  Chat box might be distracting, but voice may be restrictive 
for people still on <100k bandwidth.

> One problem: Do we settle on a fixed editor?
> Make it configurable? Give it "faces" that look
> like emacs or whatever? Not everyone agrees
> on the choice of editor. (I think my opinion is to
> have a "neutral ground" editor.)

This was the one thing that always (and still does, to some extent) scared 
me about XP.  I dread going somewhere that makes me use Visual Age (or some 
such) just because its their "standard".  You can argue that it is easy to 
adopt a programming style, but editor choice is pretty personal.  I started 
with Emacs, then vi, then Visual Age, Slick Edit, jEdit, ad nauseum... 
they're all useable, but in the end, I went back to vi.  Even with all of 
the "features" of the full IDEs, I'm still faster, and much prefer, vi.

Still, you should be able to separate the model from the view, and have 
user-defineable interfaces.  They don't even have to be the same for a pair 
at a time, if the pair only shares the *data*.  Actually, a better solution 
may just to be to pair-enable some existing editors :-)

-- 
--- SER