On 7 January 2012 08:40, Nick Sabalausky <a@a.a> wrote:
"Manu" <turkey...@gmail.com <mailto:turkey...@gmail.com>> wrote in
message
news:mailman.144.1325892989.16222.digitalmar...@puremagic.com...
>
> Most windows programmers will simply not consider the
> language until it is well supported in Visual Studio
>
Yea, and that's very unfortunate. I used to be a huge fan of visual
studio
for years (from around MSVC 5 through the first or second VS.NET
<http://VS.NET>), but now
that I've tasted the alternatives, I find the build/project
management to be
a little too "magical" and proprietary (or at least too incompatible and
inbred), and the UI to be too bloated. I think a lot of the people
who are
unwilling to try anything but a heavyweight IDE are being unfair to
themselves and their projects by keeping themselves blinded.
(Obviously, if
they've done both ways and still prefer big IDE's, that's different.)
Your personal opinion of people who use and/or prefer visual studio is
irrelevant. Most windows devs use it, and love it. It's very important.
I for one am primarily a cross platform dev, NOT a windows/x86 dev, and
I still use and prefer VisualStudio.
I have worked extensively on these platforms: Dreamcast, PS2, XBox,
Gamecube, PS3, XBox360, Wii, PSP, NDS, iPhone, Android, Windows, and
Linux... plus some others on occasion in the last 10 years. I rarely
work on x86 platforms...
Unsurprisingly, almost every platform from that list above has reasonabe
VS integration. Console SDK's are almost all exclusively VS based (this
might be why most game devs use VS... perhaps a chicken/egg problem
here, but nobody's complaining about it. Only when the VS integration is
mediocre/half arsed to people complain...) .. Some older consoles tended
to tie themselves to CodeWarrior, but thankfully, that dwindled, and the
same platforms eventually adopted a VS integration due to demand. I've
never heard of anyone who PREFERS CodeWarrior.
What would you propose I try to convince me that VS is shit and
unproductive?
I do use build tools, like premake, which are able to produce VS
projects (and makefiles, etc, for non-windows platforms/toolchains and
useful for automated scripts)...
If you're going to talk about bloated heavy-weight IDE's, have you every
tried using Eclipse? What a joke! How is it that so many years of OSS
dev and Google backing it can produce such a bloated, crap, slow,
inconsistent, unfocused/unintegrated tool?!
How about XCode? I don't understand how anyone gets any work done with
XCode, it is just soooo crap.
So what are the alternatives? An endless mountain of annoying shell
based build systems? I use them when I need to, I like premake at the
moment, and have used others previously. It's an important part of the
toolchain, but it generally results in a VS project for actually doing
productive work...
So there you go, another opinion for you, yet I believe mine is shared
by no small number of professional windows based devs ;)
And the thing is too, with popular overrated langauges like C++ or
Java, you
*need* a fancy IDE to get anywhere and still maintain sanity. But
what many
of those people don't get, is that with better languages, you *don't*
actually *need* all that other stuff. Sure, it can still be a nice
bonus,
but it's *not* a necessity like with the popular "puzzle" languages
they're
used to. It's like canned vegetables: You've gotta drench that shit
in salt,
sauces, spices, and all sorts of stuff just to make it go down. But with
food that's quality in the first place, it doesn't matter: You can
either
dress it up or leave it as-is; either way it still works
fine...no...*better* than starting with an inferior base.
Overrated? I don't think calling industry standards overrated is a
reasonable claim. they're industry standards because everyone uses
them... and everyone uses them because they are industry standards.
I've used C/C++ professionally my whole career with some C# taking over
for tools recently. I hate C++! (that's why I'm here!).. I don't hype it
up like it's awesome, but I use it because it's industry standard, there
is no viable alternative, and even if there were, it would NEED
integration with all my tools before I could use it professionally in a
full production environment.
I don't NEED an IDE to work with those languages specifically, I
*prefer* an IDE to DO WORK FASTER... I prefer an IDE even when I'm
writing python for instance, and it annoys me that there's no
IDE/debugger for embedded LUA.
If by 'better' languages, you mean D, then I completely disagree. D
*NEEDS* an IDE, just like all the rest... and in my opinion, even more
so... here are some reasons I find it so annoying there isn't a quality
VS integration for D (yet):
** auto is used liberally in D... I should be able to hover over any
variable and have a tool tip inform me what it actually is (this makes
it more important that D has an IDE than even C/C++)
** I don't have years of experience with the libraries, I SHOULD be
able to press '.' and have a list of everything the library can do
appear instantly without wasting my time trawling through the docs.
* I shouldn't have to guess or try and remember the name of some
member or method... I should be able to type the first 1-2 letters, and
have the rest of the word will appear instantly.
* If I don't know what a type is, or want to know about it in more
detail, I should be able to press F1 and see documentation about the
class/function/whatever instantly.
* I'm new to the syntax, and it's terribly nice when a little red
underline appears beneath a syntax error I've just created.
* As projects grow, things like auto-refactor save sooo much time.
Extremely difficult to implement reliably for C/C++, but should work
perfectly in D...
C# for instance, is becoming very popular. The reason for this is that
it's just sooooo fucking productive, and that's not thanks to the
language its self... any C# user will agree that at least 50% of C#'s
special power is actually it's VS integration.
The first time I used C# (knowing absolutely nothing about the
language), I opened VS, and started typing... thanks to the integration,
the language was self-documenting and self-evident. I felt immediately
productive in a language I hadn't even read a word about, and after a
little more experience, I love its efficiency for writing the kind of
code it's great at, and I always feel amazingly productive. The
experience is not limited, or even thanks to the language, it's the
whole package.
The C# experience gave me a new expectation from any new language... I
shouldn't need to KNOW a language, or basically anything about it to
start using it immediately. The IDE (auto-popup-documentation, code
completion, info tooltips, etc) is what gives me that experience.
Assuming the rest of the language and libraries are designed
intuitively, it works.
The reason it matters so much to me...
I suspect I could actually propose using D in the office for small
tasks, tools, etc... everyone hates C++, it wouldn't be hard to convince
them to give it a try.
That said, If D doesn't have an IDE, or more specifically, VS
integration, it's off the table. Period. In a multi-user project, where
all users expect VS integration, I can't do without it.
If it can manage to make a splash with newcomers like C# does, people
will be really impressed, and they'll keep coming back.
