Craig McClanahan wrote:
From a personal perspective, I was a die hard Emacs user until about a year ago, when IDEs finally started getting to the point where they could make *me* more productive.
This has really been one of the more entertaining "drivel threads" in some time, as have the seemingly 50 other baby threads it spawned (or is this itself one of the spawns? I can't keep track any more!).
But, Craig has managed to say the one truly useful thing... people are different. It's that simple.
For me, UltraEdit makes me most effective. I've used probably every IDE out there, gave each a chance to convince me to switch. Some are better than others (IDEA is one I could almost see using on a regular basis), others I can't stand (I'm looking at you WSAD, or RAD, whatever your being marketed as this week!).
Where I work, I do it like this... each person is allowed to use whatever tools they find makes them most productive and effective. The only rules I have are (a) the build process must be common and reproducible, and that means Ant for us and (b) the tools can't interfere with each other in a team environment.
What (b) generally means is that what is in the repository is strictly the code of the project, nothing that ties it to a given development environment. When a developer checks out the code to work on, they each have their own specific tasks to make it ready for their tool of choice. In most cases this amounts to either (a) just dropping it in some specific directory where they already have the IDE pointed to and set up for the project, or (b) running an Ant script that sets it up for their IDE, usually copying in some config files and such.
For us, this has worked out extremely well. We've run into almost no problems with this arrangement, and everyone is comfortable working in the way they feel they work best in.
This to me is cannon, at work and everywhere else. Some people definitely believe Eclipse makes them a better developer. Fine with me. Some people truly believe Vi is all they need to work at their peak. More power to you.
I very much DO NOT look forward to the day when we all must use the same toolset, whether its because we mostly agree its the best or because other factors leave us little choice. People are different, why shouldn't the tools we use to get our jobs done be as well?
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
