[SWLUG] Wow, seen this on Slashdot?

[Justin Mitchell]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 11:34, peter wrote:
> However, I do have to say also that MS have come up with a 
> really impressive development environment in .NET.  Couple that with 
> Visual Studio and you have a combination capable of creating secure, 
> n-Tier, distributed applications with a facility that I haven't yet 
> found with any Open Source product.

> If anyone knows of any competing environments, I'd be very happy to hear 
> about it - especially since I'm likely to be writing a paper on the 
> subject next autumn.

I have recently had to take over doing some bits of windows programming
in my job as the 'windows expert' wasnt getting very far.

I really dont see what all the fuss is about these IDE's, the
auto-complete features can be handy when working on an OO style language
true enough (especially considering how awful the docs tend to be) but
then the rest of the text editor is really frustratingly dumb when your
used to the power of an editor like vi, and the debugger is really
substandard compared to something like gdb.
with the added 'bonus' that because they are all integrated you cant
replace any of it with better ones.

So the only 'environment' i need when programming in C, or other
compiled languages is gvim and a text term with 'make' and 'man' in it.
(you can call make from inside vim, i just prefer not to)

There are also add-on scripts for vim and others to add auto-complete
features.

So, either i am missing some really key feature of the likes of borland
and microsoft visual studios, or those people complaining about a lack
of 'development environment' on linux just cant see the wood for the
trees.