On Saturday, 12 May 2012 at 06:19:37 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
I do have to say that I find it somewhat funny that this is
your set of
requirements for an IDEA and yet "integrated debugger" is in
the "some 'nice
to have' features" section. Doesn't an IDE _have_ to have an
integrated
debugger or it's only a code editor (since it lacks the whole
integrated part
of Integrated Development Environment).
- Jonathan M Davis
Indeed, and Timon forgot the best feature of IDEs for bytecode
compilers imho: they compile in the background, so that errors
are detected while you type. There is no annoying "write-correct"
cycle as compile-time errors are shown in real time. That's a
*huge* productivity boost.
It's actually better than with interpreted or scripted languages,
because once you've finished writing code, it will run !
Basically, with modern IDEs, the productivity with languages like
Java/C# is comparable to Python.
Background compiling shouldn't be too hard to implement for an
editor, I guess: run the compiler in background on the current
module every other second (or only when a set of simple syntaxic
conditions like parentheses/accolades matching are matched,
conditions which can easily be checked by the editor itself), and
display the error messages in semi real time on screen where they
appear.
