Re: best Dam*ed development environment revisited (was Re: [DotGNU]Working Groups plan v2)

[Eric Altendorf]

On Friday 18 October 2002 15:25, Stephen Compall wrote:
>     As GNU users, we vastly prefer coherent systems of tools, each
> with certain purposes, working together, instead of all lumped
> together into one package. The latter method's single tool is the
> "integrated development environment". By lumping everything
> together, creators of IDEs lose the advantages of toolchains,
> namely that [toolchains are] more dynamic in that the pieces can be
> interchanged for others, and they reuse the best of what went
> before, rather than "reinventing the wheel."

I agree that the majority of IDE's out there are rather pointless, and 
I do like the toolchaining ability of slapping together separate 
tools in a pipe or a script.

However, there are some forms of interaction between tools that are 
not supported by the Unix pipe construct -- namely, highly 
user-interactive aspects.  These are the features that are starting 
to show up in IDE's/editors that actually make them valuable.

Intelligent code completion, immediate syntax and syntax error 
highlighting, mouseovers that display documentation on the identifier 
in question, hyperlinking to variable or function declarations are 
some of the more basic things that are useful.

More advanced things like intelligent automatic code 
refactoring/rewriting (currently possible), or interactive debugging 
with the ability to change code and have it recompiled and inserted 
into the executable currently running in the VM (maybe some day) are 
other useful tasks...

IDE's have a deservedly bad reputation, but they're rapidly evolving.  
It would be dangerous for us to completely discount the IDE concept 
based on the IDE's of years past.  There are very interesting and 
valuable technologies developing in IDE's that we should keep our 
eyes on.

Eric

-- 
"First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.
 Then they fight you.  And then you win."             -Gandhi