On Jan 14, 2004, at 12:56 PM, Bradley A. Brown wrote: [..]
[..]but I heard it said once that knowledge of a language can never be replaced by an IDE.
I want to underscore that.
Mastering a Language means understanding it's subtle nuances and arcanea, which is Perl is a LifeStyle, and not something that happens in a mere 21 day cram course.
The unpleasant part is that IDE's can help simplify some of the technical minutia and as such replace some of the really routine bits. As such they can make a good programmer better, but they can make a mediocre typists perchance appear to be a coder.
Where the problems always show up is in the area of design and analysis. IDE's really can not get one out of that problem. While it can help, as more and more Editor's With LifeStyle Issues do, as in the case of bbedit - by having a 'find in reference' button that can open up the Perl Docs on a high lighted module or function - if one didn't know to think about Foo::Bar then one will not know to check it's POD.
Similarly if one Zoned OUT on writing usable POD for one's really cool perl module/application then one is again up the creek, because one's IDE will not be able to help you read up on what you failed to write up...
One can also do the OOPSIE that while this 'feature' of reading your POD is groovey, it in itself can not help you sort out how to partition up your one big perl module into a set of supporting perl modules so that one only loads the functions/methods that will be needed....
What I keep waiting for is
myCoolerIDE --no_brain_stoopids --no_bugs
so that it will protect me from coding myself into a corner because I didn't take the time to think about the problems of creating a multiple class inheritence problem that is worse than a Jeff Foxworthy Joke...
ciao drieux
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