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Re: too many buffers


From: Elena
Subject: Re: too many buffers
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 04:50:56 -0800 (PST)
User-agent: G2/1.0

On Dec 3, 7:47 am, Miles Bader <mi...@gnu.org> wrote:
> Elena <egarr...@gmail.com> writes:
> > What many programmers fail to realize about IDEs is that a lot of
> > knowledge about usability is required to develop a productive IDE, a
> > knowledge which is beyond the capabilities of the average programmer,
> > or even the experienced one.  Please, let's not confuse a bloated IDE
> > with a nice one.
>
> Judging from watching my co-workers use Visual C++, that's not a very
> good IDE either.... god what a mess its UI is (it takes them So Long to
> do even the most elementary tasks; it's downright painful to watch).

Your co-workers are rookies.  You shouldn't be judging a tool by
watching rookies using it.  Visual Studio lacks a decent editor, so
what?  It's extensible, you know.  Remedial plug-ins do exists which
will make your editing experience wickedly fast (I myself use ViEmu +
Visual Assist X).  You shouldn't be comparing a vanilla Visual Studio
to a customized Emacs, either.  It wouldn't be fair.

> Maybe they tried to do usability studies at some point but it's pretty
> clear that either that did a really bad job of them, or gave up at some
> point.  My suspicion is that many "IDEs" have grown via roughly the same
> process of feature-aggregation that Emacs has.

I have to agree with this.  I think Microsoft hitted the sweet spot
with Visual C++ 6.  Afterwards, it seemed they were adding bloat while
taking away useful features.  Ick!  This does not lessen the
advantages of using an IDE, however.  As a matter of fact, a beginner
Visual Studio user will draw circles around a beginner Emacs user.  A
beginner Emacs user will take a lot of time, possibly years, to fill
the gap.  OTOH, an experienced Emacs user will draw circles around a
beginner Visual Studio user.  This is a story we are reading all the
time by Emacs aficionados.  But what about an experienced Emacs user
vs an experienced Visual Studio user?  I am neither and I don't know.

Guys, it really is this simple: Emacs is not an IDE.  With a lot of
time and effort, you can build your own IDE upon it, but it will
benefit very little from the experience of other programmers.  Oh, and
it is easy to think your ways are effective when you have  never
compared them to other people's ways.


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