Re: [LUG] IDE

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kai Hendry wrote:
> IDEs? For me they are hooks or maps in vim.
>
> The closer to the code, the better quality and understanding you will
> have of the end product. Well, that is what I think atm, but I might
> change my mind as per usual.

Well I used Softbench at the Met Office on HP-UX, it provided a
primitive framework for compiler, Make, version control, Editor,
Debugger, and it really didn't get in the way of the code at all
-- that convinced me you could do these things well. Double
click the error message or warning from the "Make" Windows and
jump in to the editor at the right place, small visual clues for
whether it is "read only", checkout for edit if using RCS. Doing
a big project it was a god send - of course the project should
have been broken into smaller chunks, but that wasn't my
decision :-(

I think if you are doing some sorts of GUI design, then IDE's
with integrated designer make sense. I used Borland JBuilder (on
NT) in it's early days, and it was great, especially the playing
at design time with data bound controls showing the data.

However none of these later tools quite matched the simplicitity
of Softbench, and I think you can go overboard with browsers for
things, I never understood the whole gamut of what Visual
Basic's Object browser was trying to tell me about the objects.

> From a pragmatic form designer perspective Visual Basic was
probably the best tool of it's kind I've used, not much help on
Linux.

Kdevelop on GNU/Linux looked promising, but I couldn't get it to
do any of the form design type tasks I'd done with tools like
Borland JBuilder and Visual Basic, at least not in any useful
way beyond setting the initial layout, although that could be
down to my grasp of the languages and object models used.

I suspect Visual Basic won through in some areas because of the
simplicity of the underlying language, and that the IDE evolved
with the language. Whilst some mock Visual Basic, that kind of
simple form layout design, with ability to use sophisticated
third party controls which allow easy, relatively safe access to
a database, can meet a huge amount of business data entry and
processing needs - witness the success of tools like "Magic"
which was never terribly "sophisticated", but it did the job.

Multiple inheritance may be great when designing a database
bound widget, but when you just want to pull a few widgets
together to make an address book, you don't need that kind of
language power, or that sophisticate a programmer, far better to
get one who understand the problem area.

I'm sure similar tools and languages exist for GNU/Linux,
although most of those I've seen are fairly undeveloped in
comparison.

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