Developer Soup (Software Carpentry, Python, Eiffel, KDevelop)

[Pieter Nagel]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Mike Steed wrote:

> You might be surprised at the number of people who have tried the
> "world-class IDEs" on Windows and other platforms and found that they are
> just as productive (or more so) with "crusty old Unix" tools such as those
> you mention.

The problem with most "world-class IDEs" is that they try to provide
everything, in a single, non-extensible, forced, and closed way -
instead of just creating an "ecology" within which everything can
easily be provided.

The "everything is a file" paradigm used by the crusty old Unix tools
is a rather *low* level common denominator to to pass structured
program data around with - but its virtue is that it *is* a *common*
denominator, and a lot of power flows from that.

I sometimes wonder what Unix tools would have been like if, instead
of ASCII text files, they had a common "everything is a graph"
paradigm with accompanying standard file format...

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