[SWLUG] Not seeing the Code for the IDE

[Justin Mitchell]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 19:42, peter wrote:
> I think you're missing something.
quite possibly, but perhaps its hard to spot what through all the
buzzwords ;)

> 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.
As i said earlier, i dont see what advantage any of those environments
offer other than the auto-complete, which i already mentioned is
generally available as a plugin to the more competent editors like vi or
emacs.

I guess if its what your used to, and all you expect of a text editor is
notepad, then you dont miss things like the advanced search and replace
mechanisms provided by the likes of vi.

> 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.
These are programming styles, nothing to do with the development
environment or language being used.  

You can write programs that fit all of these criteria in pretty much any
language, heck i think even shell script fulfuls the goals, lets see
now:
secure: goes without saying, be careful delimiting user input.
n-tier: afaics thats just writing layers of abstraction
distributed: networking is pretty easy using netcat
cross-platform: cant get much more cross platform than a script


> 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. 
ahhh, so your not talking about the same kind of development
environments after all, ie enviroments to make programming in a given
language easier. what your talking about are lego brick 'programming' (i
use the term loosely) tools.

Well, yup, i guess hands up there, cant say ive seen many 'plug the
blocks together', rapid development tools i think they call them?
well, other than the ones designed to teach children simple programming
concepts ;)

Perhaps someone else will have suggestions on this subject.

>  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.  
again, autocomplete.

> And learning every nuance of how a particular compiler works in order
> to put it all together is also something that simply drains
> productivity.
you must be using different compilers to me then, cant say ive ever come
across one that behaved in a way other than the expected one.
but then again i havent tried using any commandline dos/win ones.