On Aug 16, 2007, at 3:38 PM, Uri Guttman wrote: > but that isn't the issue. ide's don't help anyone with the real deeper > problem which is analysis. this harkens back to the concept of one > good > expert programmer is better than N junior ones. it comes down to good > architecture and design that acheives the current goals and > anticipates > future ones. i mark something as good architecture when adding > signifigant features down the road is a breeze vs a complete > rewrite. IDEs can't possibly help with this.
Ah, but they can. See, one way that IDEs help Java programmers is by drastically reducing the pain of changes to the architecture. There's less pressure to get the big design right in the first place: if it turns out that this class really needs to be two classes, the IDE with good support for refactoring makes that change with a lot less typing and a lot less chance for typos and thinkos. This changes the analysis from something that must be done correctly up front, before any coding starts, into something that can be done iteratively, and revised and improved as more is discovered about the problem domain. The experienced programmer is still valuable, because he'll see the dead ends before the inexperienced programmer will, and he'll spend less time on dead-end paths, but they'll both do better with an IDE, because if there's one thing true in the world of software development, it's that specifications change. > so my main point is that coders need to be smarter about their > analysis, > architecture and design and less caught up in tools like IDE's and > syntax highlighting. you can have the greatest IDE in the world and > still come up with crappy code and solutions. whereas a good software > design can be written and debugged with any set of tools. This is all true, but I'd say, rather than condemning IDEs, that the quality of the end result is independent of the quality of the tools, but the overall pain is likely to be less with better tools. I mean, the same argument can be made for preferring line editors over visual editors, for preferring VT100s over dual 24" pretty colored screens, and for preferring punched cards and batch processing over interactive editing. No doubt a Real Programmer could produce just as good a program using boxes of punched cards and keypunches as I can with Emacs, but I bet I can get a lot more done in a day. Charlton -- Charlton Wilbur [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
