Loosely-coupled development environment

[Ben Finney]

Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp at snipabacken.se> writes:

> On Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:47:36 +1100, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > Instead, I find the greater gain comes from a working environment
> > of *loosely-coupled* tools, with standard well-defined interfaces,
> > that one can flexibly mold and reconnect to meet whatever task is
> > at hand. The deeper this extends into the operating system, the
> > more the system as a whole will be able to support this
> > flexibility, and the more likely the tools will have been designed
> > to do so.
> >
> > Because of the inescapable central role in our craft of
> > manipulating text files, essential in this development environment
> > is a highly-customisable text editor with a broad *and* deep
> > library of existing customisations, to maximise the amount of work
> > already done for you when embarking on work in an area that is, to
> > you, new.
> 
> You think like I think, but I think your standards are too high. I
> like claiming "my IDE is Emacs and Unix", but in fact I know very
> little about how to customize Emacs using elisp

No, I'm in the same situation: my Emacs Lisp knowledge is virtually
non-existent. Fortunately, just about anything I want Emacs to do has
already been programmed by someone else, so in practice all I need to
know is how to access the community's extenstions, as said above.

> I use a Unix shell on the side to do the non-editing tasks which I
> guess you train your editor to do.

Yes, I didn't stress the importance of a full-blown Unix shell (with
all the commands one normally expects at such a shell) in such an
environment. I think “powerful editor (Emacs or Vim) plus Unix shell
environment” is a good first approximation of my recommended
development environment.

(good sigmonster, have a cookie)

-- 
 \      “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… |
  `\    It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in |
_o__)                        the opposite direction.” —Albert Einstein |
Ben Finney