I actually like eclipse and wouldn't want to code if a decent IDE weren't
available. I had never heard of jEdit. From its web page it sounds like an
editor moving in the direction of becoming an IDE. That's fine. But if one
wants an IDE why not use one?

The biggest problem I have with eclipse is that it seems to have developed
some bugs. That's surprising (to me) since it seemed so solid up 'til the
latest few versions.

When I teach Haskell, one of the biggest problems I have is that there are
no good IDEs for it.  Hugs provides a useful workspace, but people have been
moving to GHC, which simulates a command window. jEdit says it supports
Haskell syntax highlighting, which is better than nothing.

Among the reasons I like eclipse (and other decent IDEs) is that they know a
lot about the language one is using. It's very nice to see syntax errors,
type mismatches, etc. noted while editing. It's also nice to have the system
change all instances of names when I change a variable or method name, (Or
even a class or package name.) It also provides support for changing the
number of parameters to a method, and if you try such a change on a method
in a subclass that overrides that method in the superclass it asks if you
really want to make the change there.

As I said before, the value of a decent IDE is that it knows about the
language you are using and can help in ways that an editor that doesn't have
the knowledge can't.


-- Russ



On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 7:16 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote:

> It's directly proportional to how gawd awful languages and their management
> become.  Basically programming environments have gotten so bad that You Need
> Help!
>
> I will say, however, there's an interesting new breed of editors that are
> halfway between "text editors" and IDEs.  TextMate is absfab on the mac, and
> the jedit program is getting lots of love.
>
>    -- Owen
>
>
>
> On Mar 12, 2010, at 7:00 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
>
>  Well, yes, as a matter of fact.  But I didn't want to resurrect  any old
>> editor wars.   I've lived inside Emacs-based development/debugging
>> environments for a couple of decades.  Scary, no?
>>
>> --Doug
>>
>
>
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