Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?

[Torsten Mueller]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> > Programming is heavily concerned by drudge tasks, unless someone
> > has come up with ways to automate them.
>
> Your world of programming then is very different from mine.
>
> I've only worked on Free Software projects (some of them linked to
> academic research, others not), so maybe I'm biased or blind, but
> really if the amount of "drudge tasks" is so high, it would seem to
> me that you probably have a real problem elsewhere which would be
> better solved by eliminating those tasks completely rather then by
> automating them via IDEs.

I would like to agree with that completely.

I always tell the students if they come into the situation to do the
same things again and again they do something wrong. They should think
about refactoring their code. Younger people oftenly tend to use
complex tools to automate such things. So Microsoft has a Class
Wizzard to put a C++ class into a header and a source file and also
such Wizzards for methods. People using this heavily have no idea
about the file structures of their code. But hey, if I can't orientate
in my own code or the code I'm working on in a team, if I can't handle
this aspect of my job without a complicated tool there's something
gone wrong long before. And I do really speak from large software
projects.

You must also think about the time you spend with which task while
programming. These stupid tasks of editing or formatting code are
normally not the time killers. You spend much more time thinking about
the logic of your application and debugging it. Sometimes I write only
ten lines of code in ten hours of work - and even then I have the
feeling of having done something good and necessary.

T.M.