[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I am sceptical of comments such as those of Erik's (no disrespect > intended here).
No offence taken. > I suspect these people either have not tried using > an IDE or simply haven't made the effort to learn to use the IDE and > take full advantage of it. As little as a 18 months ago I spend about 6 months maintaining 100k lines of mixed C++ and C# code using Visual Studio 2005, the IDE all the IDE fans rave about. It found the Visual Studio experience amazingly underwhelming; beyond tedious. The GUI hid details from me that I thought I needed to know and got in my way when I thought it should stay out of it. More recently I spend a couple of months using the Adobe Flash GUI development tools. Again I found this a woefully tedious exercise and wished for command line tools to replace the stupid and annoying GUI. The GUI thought it knew how I wanted to format my Actionscript code better than I did. The funny thing is that my preferences for command line tools was something I developed after my first exposure to an IDE. My first serios coding was done on Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C IDEs back in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s I did a lot of FPGA development using the Xilinx development tools. It was the inadequacy of these tools which forced me back to Make because my Makefile understood the build process I wanted to achieve better than than the Xilinx tools. Later on in my FPGA design career I would do schematic entry of FPGA designs, export a Xilinx XNF netlist, convert the XNY netlist to VHDL using a utility I wrote and then run that VHDL through a simulator. This was actually a pivotal event for me because I was able to do better work by breaking free of the IDE which limited what I could do. IDEs still limit what I can do. How many IDEs allow for meta programming; source code compiling to programs which generate code which gets compiled to create the final program? How many IDEs cater for more than one language? The thing is I use lots of lanaguages. At work I work on a number of projects, some in C, some in C++ and some in Ocaml. Doing it my way, with Linux as my IDE, means that apart from the compilers, everything else is the same. Same editor and same build system (make possibly augmented with the autotools). How many people who use multiple languages are willing to learn a different IDE for each language? Eclipse is not the answer either because however good it might be for Java its not very good for other langauges. > Which is surprising since mastering Ocaml > requires much effort, and all here seem to agree that the added > productivity of using Ocaml is worth it ;-). The same can be said for the Unix IDE, but the UNIX IDE is 100 times more flexible and more capable than any other IDE in existance. I know Make well enough to whip up a complex make file in minutes. I am also intimately familair with the automake/ autoconf/libtool set. Since these tools are so flexible they adapt to my requirements and never force me to work the way they are designed. > In fact mastering > emacs, vi, etc. with all those "modes" also requires a lot of > work. I don't like emacs and vi. My editor of choice for the last 13 years has been nedit (Nirvana Editor) which has syntax highlighting for dozens of languages (and it easy to add new ones or modify existing ones), regex search/replace and macros. Its configurable so over the years I have bent it into the shape I want. The same goes for my Unix shell. > Why should the use of an IDE be any different? Unix is my IDE and I am reasonably certain that I can do more with my IDE than you can do with yours :-). By more, I mean more languages, more meta programming, more custom build options with more languages. I suspect that a lot of the people who think Ocaml needs an IDE are people whose primay development platform is windows. Erik PS : Here's a nickle kid. Go and buy yourself a real computer :-). -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind parents ...and it is evident that the end of the world is approaching fast." -- Assyrian Tablet Engraved in 2800 B.C. _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs