Smarter Form Targeting Is Not Coming to CIDER

A couple of days ago I wrote that smarter form targeting was coming to CIDER, and I ended that post by asking whether I’d got the resolution rules right and whether anything still surprised people. I got an answer. CIDER 2.1 will ship with the classic behaviour intact. This is not a sad story, though. The detour turned up a bug that was quietly mangling people’s comments, and CIDER came out of it better than it went in. What I was actually after The targeting change wasn’t really about cursor positions. What I wanted was for every CIDER command that operates on a form to behave the same way, without adding yet another command to get there. CIDER has an enormous surface of evaluation commands, and every “at point” variant I could have added would have made that worse. If the existing commands simply resolved the form you meant, newcomers would have had fewer commands to learn, not more. That was the bet: consistency by redefinition rather than by addition. In hindsight it was the wrong…