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Maybe it goes back to my frustrations with Dreamweaver, but I always felt like an IDE only served two purposes - to prevent developers from really learning a la

by bphogan 17y ago

Maybe it goes back to my frustrations with Dreamweaver, but I always felt like an IDE only served two purposes - to prevent developers from really learning a language (autocompletes, intellisense, etc) and making up for poorly designed, overly-verbose syntaxes. Here we are in 2010 and most programming languages still contain tons of semicolons, parans, and curly braces, and the only reasons I can find for this is: * Language y looks like langage x because everyone's comfortable with language x's syntax already which is contradicted by * Having trouble with curlybraces and semicolons? Your IDE will do that for you. We need IDEs to deal with ugly syntax, and we have ugly syntax cos we've always had ugly syntax, but we then use IDEs to write the ugly syntax. And then I hear people deride VB, Ruby, and Python for it's lack of curly braces and parens. So, I don't think IDEs are the answer. I think better syntaxes are the answer. For example, I used Textmate's easy HTML completion shortcuts for a long time. Then I found HAML, and I didn't need to close tags anymore. I use Sass, and now my CSS doesn't need ; or {} anymore. Same with CoffeeScript. C#, Java, Lisp, Perl, JavaScript are all great powerful languages, but I just get really uncomfortable hearing people defend the syntax with "just use your IDE". We're programmers. How come we're not interested in saying "hey, let's fix these things!" If the argument is "IDEs make you more productive in language X" then doesn't that say something about language x? Just some thoughts.

stcredzero 17y ago
Well, that's quite an extrapolation from my recommendation to use automation to match brackets/parens. Python is almost there in terms of language simplicity, but I'd much rather count parens than count spaces/tabs. The former are visible. The latter are only visible through secondary effect. Any tool can be abused. Not using automation for truly mindless tasks like counting parens is often just a knee-jerk reaction that precludes real thinking about the cost/risk/benefit of the tool. Programming has always been full of idiots who turn off their brains. Maybe modern tools make this a bit too easy. I'd posit that one way to detect programmers with such proclivities is to discuss tools with them, and see if they give you back unsupported prejudice or reasoned analysis. (Really be wary of the ones who try to pawn off prejudice as reasoned analysis!)

by bphogan 17y ago

stcredzero 17y ago

Well, that's quite an extrapolation from my recommendation to use automation to match brackets/parens. Python is almost there in terms of language simplicity, but I'd much rather count parens than count spaces/tabs. The former are visible. The latter are only visible through secondary effect. Any tool can be abused. Not using automation for truly mindless tasks like counting parens is often just a knee-jerk reaction that precludes real thinking about the cost/risk/benefit of the tool. Programming has always been full of idiots who turn off their brains. Maybe modern tools make this a bit too easy. I'd posit that one way to detect programmers with such proclivities is to discuss tools with them, and see if they give you back unsupported prejudice or reasoned analysis. (Really be wary of the ones who try to pawn off prejudice as reasoned analysis!)