Community (A Modest Proposal)

[Cameron Simpson]

On 15Jun2010 07:25, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
| In some languages, due to the size and complexity of the libraries, an
| IDE is essential.  Java is one of those languages.

Hmm. I'm in the "terminals are my IDE" camp. I never felt any need to
use an IDE when I was using Java. Indeed, the highly linked and cross
referenced nature of javadoc output made the docs so helpful that I
doubt I would ever want in-editor completion/prompting.

So "essential"? No. For people comfortable in IDEs, they're probably
very helpful.

| C++ development also
| highly benefits.  Any compiled language also benefits from the project
| management and build management tools that an IDE provides.

And there's the rub. IDEs tend to force the programmer into their tools,
rather than letting the programmer choose the tools. The xterms+vim
approach is really "your desktop is the IDE". The programmer can use
their preferred editor, their preferred terminal or interactive code
interpreter, their preferred document viewer, their preferred build tool
(vi[m], rxvt-unicode, web browser, myke respectively for me). If the IDE
doesn't integrate _your_ preferred tools, the IDE isn't helping you.

| Project and
| build management and code completion are the killer features of IDEs.
| Vim has some code completion, but it's nowhere as easy to use or
| complete as in Visual Studio.
| 
| With python I can usually get away with one interactive python session,
| a vim editor, my Python in a nutshell book, and the python.org docs.
| That's largely because python's standard libraries have help strings,
| and python lets you navigate the live object space.  Also it helps that
| Python's libraries don't get hung up quite so much on patterns and
| LongDescriptiveNames.

I'm not a fan of code completion; I find it annoying and cumbersome. But
that is just me. My fingers speak vi (indeed, I'm writing this email in
vi as well) and don't want to learn a suite of extras. I'm sure an adept
user of an IDE can produce syntactically correct and correctly spelt
code text faster than I, but I don't think that's where the majority of
my screen time goes.

Good docs (clean well indexed HTML, like javadoc and the python docs)
and a good HTML reader for me, rather than code completion.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

DRM: the functionality of refusing to function. - Richard Stallman