Are there many programmers on this list?
Yep.
I've spent years programming in VB, FoxPro, SQL(variants a many), VBA, ASP,
You have my sympathies.
I've yet to actually see a fully interactive GUI based development and debugging enviornment such as you get with VB, ASP (Visual Interdev) and the rest of the Microsoft tools.
It sounds like you need to learn emacs. I tried once for a few months, and while it's an impressive toolkit/IDE, it wasn't for me.
Personally, i use vim. It doesn't integrate a debugger, but since i'm programming mostly in java & some C, it doesn't need to either. It is however the fastest editor on the face of the planet, and navigating huge projects is rather quick.
I'd start developing more applications for the Linux platform but I've yet to see anything other than very basic 'code and compile' CLI enviornments that I used to use back in the early 80's. That to me is a huge step backwards.
You are just looking at the lowest level. UNIX, and by inference linux, uses small building blocks. Don't like the look of gdb? There are GUI interfaces aplenty (even emacs has one built in). They still use gdb underneath. This is typical.
Rex
