Walter Bright wrote:
Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
I also agree with Walter about the lack of an IDE for D as powerful as
Visual Studio, I myself use poseidon only because of its overly simple
build process and simple project manager and debug in windbg. But that
isn't the case with most programmers who like or dislike a language
based on the IDE they use.
I do hear over and over that without a VS workalike IDE, programmers
just aren't interested in a language. They argue, probably with a lot of
merit, that the productivity increase of using VS is more than the
productivity increase of using a better language.
It's clear Microsoft has hit a home run with VS.
I was talking to some serious hardcore C++ programmers yesterday. One
was a die-hard emacs user, and he admitted that he'd switched to VS and
wasn't looking back, it was that much better. I asked him what the
killer feature of VS was, and he said it was being able to instantly see
every use and definition of a symbol.
(With emacs he'd have to run ctags first, and even then ctags was
inaccurate and clumsy.)
Yeah I'm also a die hard fan of VS when coding C/C++, while I don't
require many features when I write code other than a project manager,
syntax highlighter and a convenient build tool, I do use way more of its
features when I study code I didn't write myself. The ability to grep
for every reference to a given symbol from a simple click is simply
amazing for that, jumping to the declaration of a symbol is also as
useful, so is the call browser.
An IDE doesn't require a large set of features to be useful, but it
definitely needs to implement the features it has in such a convenient
way that you don't notice their presence. I myself often disable the
annoying suggestion popups in an IDE and a few other features, but thats
just me :)
