[SWLUG] Not seeing the Code for the IDE

[peter]

Justin Mitchell wrote:

>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.

I think you're missing something.

If I were doing low level programming in C, I would not use VS or any other IDE at any price.  I'd probably use emacs, but that's just a personal preference.

If I were writing GUI apps in C for Linux, I might use Anjuta.

If I were writing application software in C++, I'd use Anjuta or KDevelop or VS depending on the platform.

But I'm not.

I'm writing, or trying to write, secure, n-Tier, distributed and hopefully cross-platform apps.  It is not feasible to choose a language like C (or C++) to do that - because I'm already 58 years old and I'd like to get some apps finished before I die.

The emphasis here is on "n-Tier" and "distributed" in respect of the lack of F/OSS choices.  These things require a huge amount of ready-prepared infrastructure - of plumbing, if you like.  It's also why an IDE is so useful.  Remembering the exact method calls and all their overloads in these massive code libraries is not something to take lightly.  And learning every nuance of how a particular compiler works in order to put it all together is also something that simply drains productivity.

Now if I were writing Java programs I'd use one of Eclipse, NetBeans or JBuilder depending on the kind of support I wanted.  For .NET (including mono), VS is really the only choice at the moment.  And in my opinion, .NET has some real advantages over Java, not the least of which is that it is much easier to implement the kind of program I'm talking about in .NET than in J2EE (although this may not be so for very, very large scale applications).  At least that's my current opinion.  I'm open to persuasion to the contrary from any Java gurus out there.

As for debugging, well I haven't found much to pick between any of the debuggers I've used, and that includes gdb.  As long as the debugger supports the debugging of applications running in different processes (perhaps on different machines), I'll use whatever's handy.  As long as I can step in, step over, step out, and examine the contents of variables, I'm happy.

Perhaps *I'm* missing something.  It has been known ...

:)

Cheers

Peter