I can't resist, either. I'm firmly in the editor camp. I find GUIs ALWAYS get in my way eventually. But I want an editor to have as many GUI features as possible so I can work more efficiently, while still being an editor. I've tried Emacs and finally run away from it screaming. So often I needed to do something simple, only to pull my hair out 1/2 hour later finding the answer buried beneath some exceptionally poorly put-together documentation or odd terminology. Or making me learn lisp. Or three or four initialization files which can interact in strange ways. Or, or, or ...
I finally broke down and BOUGHT an editor. I know, it isn't open source but for me a good editor is worth the money. Opponents of Open Source used to say that it would drive out good products because its authors couldn't make a living competing with free, inferior ones, but that's not true in my case. For me, EMACS is good enough for casual work, but not serious work. I know, if I had written it, I might think differently, or if I took the time needed to become strongly familiar with it, I might change my tune, but enough already. So I'm using Visual Slick Edit. Does everything I want. Has a nice class browser right in the editor (much better than Speedbar). Works exactly the same on Unix as it does on Windows. I'm incredibly efficient with it. And the latest version finally adds decent XML support which wasn't there previously. I love Open Source. And I use this editor to create it more efficiently. There are no absolutes. -----Original Message----- From: Sean Landis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tue 5/21/2002 11:29 AM To: Ant Users List Cc: Subject: Re: OFFTOPIC! RE: IDEs vs. text editors, was RE: Borland Jbuilder f inally adds ant support (at a price) I can't resist. ;-) I use JBuilder and TogetherJ Solo. But I use them rarely. Most of my work is in emacs because for day-to-day coding it's simply more efficient. JBuilder is great for building GUIs; I hear it's also great for RAD of various enterprise apps but I don't do that. TogetherJ is awesome for reverse engineering and forward engineering when you no so little about the problem that you need modeling. Unfortunately, both are a pain in the butt when it comes to plan ol' coding. Niether has an efficient editor, and building systems with all drag-n-drop or model generation is simply too slow. So I build a GUI in JBuilder and move back to emacs. Or I start a hard project with some modeling TJ to get the basic structure, and then I dispense of that. Becoming proficient in any of these three is probably about the same degree of difficulty. I don't consider any of them easier to learn to use well. I suppose if I built enterprise, n-tier, or web apps for a living, I might do end-to-end development in JBuilder. I can't see any reason to use a modeling tool, even a really good round-trip tool like TJ, end-to-end. Here's the thing: the premise of that type of tool is that it eases your work by operating at a higher abstraction level; but to do that well, you have to really know what you're doing. If you really know what you are doing, it's usually faster to ditch the IDE once you have the basic models established. About the only advantage of a tool like this, end-to-end, is when you are working with big teams where the a means of communication is either the models and/or the code. Agile development proponents would argue the code is the best means as it is 0 degrees removed from reality. This is usually the case, but with TJ it reverses so well that it allows you an alternative view. That has a lot of value since the other requirement for agile is high team competency. Unfortunatly that doesn't scale beyond teams of a few. Ok, done blathering. Sean
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