Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?

[Elena]

Torsten Mueller wrote:

    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.

Or use better tools for the task at hand.

    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.


I agree on this, but then this is not a fault of IDEs.  I use IDEs
exclusively, but I know how things work deep down.  Often I've edited
some files directly, to which the IDE at hand didn't provide access
to.

    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.


The issue here is not that we can't do without IDEs.  The issue is
that IDEs are a productivity booster, and in an highly competitive
market, that matters.  Building applications from a set of projects,
refactoring, navigating help, context-sensitive code-completion, etc.
are solved problems.  If you want to solve problems already solved,
that's not engineering.


    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.


OTOH, there are programming tasks which do not require such
ruminations.  Often enough, in my experience, it's just a matter of
gluing together existing libraries.  Yes, it won't be rewarding to
your soul like carving new algorithms, but if you don't get
applications out of the door quickly enough, your competitors will.

Ehi, why the hell do we use calculators to perform calculations?
Don't we know how to perform them by hand anymore?  And why the hell
do we use mail clients to process our mails?  We just need
"fetchmail", "smtpmail", "grep" and a text editor, don't we?  And then
we should just try to automate mail-related tasks.  ;-)))))