begin quoting Paul G. Allen as of Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 08:59:56AM -0700: [snip] > What I laugh at is those that insist on remaining "old school" because > they think it's better than using the IDE or GUI tool, when in actuality > they are slower at many tasks than they are when they use the IDE or GUI > tool.
Depends on what you're trying to do. The problem with many IDEs is that they forget the primary purpose is to write code, and they provide an absolutely sucky editor, and a ton of crap to "help"... forgetting that the editor is the _key_ tool in the programmer's toolbox. Another problem is that IDEs seem to expect you to bring all of your development into _their_ environment; I have an environment I like, thank you very much, I don't need your lame-ass version. That being said, if your environment sucks, the lame-ass version in the IDE would probably be an improvement. From this I conclude that IDEs generally spring up on platforms where the environment is NOT pleasant. (This also explains smalltalk and emacs, I believe.) > (Example: Typing in a complicated grep command instead of using > something like Understand where the answers can be found and browsed in > a matter of seconds.) I've never used Understand. It was installed on a machine I used once, but it didn't seem all that useful, probably because I had no documentation for it, and didn't have the time to futz with it. > I've found many of these types will talk about all > the negative things about a given GUI tool without ever even trying it > out. I discovered that Eclipse has a "decent" vi editor plugin, so I gave it a try. Having a decent (even if crippled) editor in Eclipse (and a faster machine) made it possible for me to give it another try. I found some things nice, but I was a bit annoyed at the complexity Eclipse brings to the table. So I tried netbeans, as it has the "jvi" plugin... and it's been blowing the doors of Eclipse, so far as providing a usable and pleasant development environment. I spent a week on getting Eclipse set up in order to do reasonable development... and I was having a WTF? moment a half-dozen times per day. I lost half-days to starting over in order to correct some little gotcha I missed before. I got to an equivalent level of functionality in NetBeans in a *day*. Then I installed the profiler and played with it. Then the debugger. I just don't think NetBeans will do C or C++. So it's a little off-topic. ... One of the things more useful in GUIs (at least, I haven't found a CLI version yet) is refactoring. For Java, I have a very nice tool called "RefactorIt", with a gazillion refactorings. When I was doing C++, I went looking for something similiar... and came up dry. The _only_ useful C++ refactoring tool I found was SlickEdit. Which, actually, was pretty slick. It's not cheap, but if you want the GUI experience when writing C++, try out the trial version, and maybe purchase a license or three. (I develop on Linux, Solaris, and OS X, so that means the REALLY EXPENSIVE version of slickedit, so I don't own a personal copy.) > I've been known to use GUI and command line tools together, whichever > one will help me complete my task faster. I find that reducing cognitive dissonance (i.e., minimizin WTF?! moments) is more important than apparent speed. For example, the auto-complete stuff in Eclipse and NetBeans seems like it would be very useful... except that as a touch-typist, it sometimes tries to auto-complete stuff as I'm typing, and the delay between seeing when it tries to help and my telling my fingers to stop can lead to me really screwing up my code. So now _whenever_ the IDE pops up a helpful dialog/tooltip/annotation, I stop typing... and thinking about what I'm trying to do. > I also like to try things > people recommend as time permits because I might find (as I have in the > past) that I actually like them better than whatever I've currently set > my mind on. Indeed. It's just not right to rant about how something sucks until you've tried it out at least a little bit. (Just as it isn't right to wax poetic about how wonderful something is until you've used it "in anger".) -- No credentials. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
