This is a great example that shows how poor most non-web debugging and logging. The ability to mix and match data types and presentation format is extremely useful. Almost everywhere else we just have printf. And that’s printf going to stdout — there isn’t a universally deployed format to even allow it to travel easily over the network and be viewed on one of many useful and advanced viewers.

I think part of the problem is that programmers rarely want to get into these supportive details; they just printf and get on with it.

Only for those developers that insist in not using IDEs.

Common Lisp and Smalltalk environments have something like console.table since its early days.

Xerox even went to the trouble of adding similar capabilities to the Mesa/Cedar enviroment, because they thought they should cater to their Interlisp-D and Smalltalk developers.

Java and .NET even allow to provide metadata so that debuggers know what is the best way to render the data in debug view.

Visual Studio allows similar capabilities for C++ via data visualizers.

Now if you insist in vim and Emacs, there is printf.

ultim8k

I will start using IDEs again once they get instant, mouse-free, java-crawltime-env free and get easily extensible like most modern editors are.

pjmlp

Can you please provide a screenshot of something like Console.table() for a tree data structure on your extensible modern editor?

gkya

This would be fairly easy to build in Emacs for almost any language, but I can't see how this is so useful. Furthermore, if working with Org mode source blocks, it can render structured data as tables upon evaluation. Say you have this block:

  #+BEGIN_SRC elisp
  (list (list 'col1 'col2) (list 1 2))
  #+END_SRC

(I don't use quote syntax to not confuse non-lispers) Hitting C-c C-c on it produces the following block just below it:

  #+RESULTS:
  | col1 | col2 |
  |    1 |    2 |

With Org source blocks you can have a literate program even using multiple languages and still communicating easily between source code blocks and both generated and static tables. It can easily be intermixed with formatted text and exported to a suite of various formats, including plain text source code (so-called "tangled source").

Edit: just for the sake of it, another example, this one in Python:

  #+BEGIN_SRC python
  return [[x for x in range(1,5)],
          [chr(y) for y in range(ord('a'),ord('e'))]]
  #+END_SRC
  
  #+RESULTS:
  | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
  | a | b | c | d |

oblio

I don't get why in this day and age we can't have proper text mode interfaces.

Freaking IBM had box drawing characters in freaking 1985, how hard is it to have them in 2018? https://www.ascii-codes.com/

See this:

  ┌─┬┐  
  │ ││  
  ├─┼┤  
  └─┴┘

vs the crappy table.

gowld

The point of Org mode is that you can type the table.

How do you type ┌─ ?

It's easier to use a font that renders "regular" keyboard characters as borders, akin to https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode