On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, McKown, John wrote: > http://www.recursivity.com/blog/2012/10/28/ides-are-a-language-smell/ > > This person, a PC type, has come to the conclusion that "IDEs" exist due > to the horrible nature of the languages that they support (in his case > Java). That, with a properly designed language, a simple highlighting > editor (PDF editor to us, vim/emacs to him) is more than sufficient for > coding.
Myself I agree with the guy, assuming I understand what he writes :-). I.e., IDEs are ok to use but for me, it is also nice to realise that whenever a language is depending on sophisticated tool to be usable, I may look for some other language. I don't mean dependence on compilers, debuggers and so on - this I take for granted. But if I needed a superb tool to simply say a computer what it should do, I would rather try something that did not force me like this. If we look at this from perspective presented in this article: http://osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides then I am a language maven. I guess this is what he wanted to say. > The article is short, but I found it interesting because the Windows > people tend to denigrate us for the lack of IDEs on the mainframe. Well, if we roughly group languages by some (arbitrary of course) criteria, like Python+Ruby+Perl is one group, sh+ksh+csh is another, C/C++/Java yet another, most functional langs form a group, Schemes and other Lisps form their own, then I would not eagerly accept criticism from people who only had experience with one group. They may still have some valuable insights but I think they are also more probable to lack perspective (broader look). If someone knows only programming by IDE, I would expect he lacks perspective. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:[email protected] ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
