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I started programming as a young man on Visual Studio programming in VB and C++. There came a day years ago where I had to work with a text editor and a termina

by weak 17y ago

I started programming as a young man on Visual Studio programming in VB and C++. There came a day years ago where I had to work with a text editor and a terminal on an AIX system and was surprised at how little I knew in terms of compiling, building, and programming in general (how is a class structured again? What packages/headers do I need to reference? What directories do my files have to be in? Why isn't my code running?). I think it's important that those who code exclusively in IDEs step back every now and then and understand how these 'auto-magic' functions IDEs provide work. I've now spent years using IDEs in addition to my own custom environment (I switch back and forth between vi, gedit, and textmate (when i'm on a mac) and make extensive use of sed/awk and other CLI commands to do custom activities that IDEs certainly cannot provide). IDEs bring a lot to the table, but I can't help but agree with you in that it can be a horrible experience, especially to those who are accustomed to having complete control over everything in their environment. I think it's great for getting things done efficiently, but developing exclusively with them can bring a close-minded view of how things work.

abalashov 17y ago
You read the article I linked to, right? I can hardly disagree. Nevertheless, after writing code that way for so long and being a very zealous old-school UNIX guy, I guess I'm interested in trying a newer, more conventional way of doing things.
- axod 17y ago
  'more convenient' often means far more trouble in the long run. I've seen colleagues use their IDE build process which is completely broken, and spend a day trying to figure out what's wrong... (Never use a build process in an IDE). You see people blindly creating source files that are thousands of lines long and not noticing since their IDE folds the code etc. The IDE hides the bloat. Which is a terrible thing. When you start trying to integrate svn, build process, etc into an IDE, everything goes wrong. The 'intelligence' in textmate was even too much for me. Inserting "" when I pressed it once, trying to do code indenting. It still drives me mad how it handles tab and spaces (When I press delete, I want it to remove one space. Not 4). I really don't think an IDE is 'more conventional'. Perhaps in corporate cubeville.
  - abalashov 17y ago
    I guess I avoid some of these pitfalls because I wrote C and Perl with vi for 10 years, and used a relatively spartan FVWM environment consisting solely of terminals and command-line approaches to all problems. That method of approaching programming and technical work isn't going to change for me even if I forklift-upgrade my Java text editor to something a little fancier, which is essentially what I see myself to have done here. I can't use an integrated build process anyway because I'm working on a backend server process that necessarily must reside on a remote machine; there'd be virtually no point in trying to develop or run it locally, as it depends on connectivity to too many other resources for any aspect of its functionality. So, I mount the source directory over SSHFS or NFS and edit it "locally" with Eclipse, but the build process is remote and done via a manually crafted Ant build file. I haven't seen Eclipse fold any code other than the big comment block at the top of every source file. I wouldn't be opposed to integrating SVN awareness into it, but find it a bit problematic since I'm using SVN over SSH.

by weak 17y ago

abalashov 17y ago

You read the article I linked to, right? I can hardly disagree. Nevertheless, after writing code that way for so long and being a very zealous old-school UNIX guy, I guess I'm interested in trying a newer, more conventional way of doing things.

axod 17y ago
'more convenient' often means far more trouble in the long run. I've seen colleagues use their IDE build process which is completely broken, and spend a day trying to figure out what's wrong... (Never use a build process in an IDE). You see people blindly creating source files that are thousands of lines long and not noticing since their IDE folds the code etc. The IDE hides the bloat. Which is a terrible thing. When you start trying to integrate svn, build process, etc into an IDE, everything goes wrong. The 'intelligence' in textmate was even too much for me. Inserting "" when I pressed it once, trying to do code indenting. It still drives me mad how it handles tab and spaces (When I press delete, I want it to remove one space. Not 4). I really don't think an IDE is 'more conventional'. Perhaps in corporate cubeville.
- abalashov 17y ago
  I guess I avoid some of these pitfalls because I wrote C and Perl with vi for 10 years, and used a relatively spartan FVWM environment consisting solely of terminals and command-line approaches to all problems. That method of approaching programming and technical work isn't going to change for me even if I forklift-upgrade my Java text editor to something a little fancier, which is essentially what I see myself to have done here. I can't use an integrated build process anyway because I'm working on a backend server process that necessarily must reside on a remote machine; there'd be virtually no point in trying to develop or run it locally, as it depends on connectivity to too many other resources for any aspect of its functionality. So, I mount the source directory over SSHFS or NFS and edit it "locally" with Eclipse, but the build process is remote and done via a manually crafted Ant build file. I haven't seen Eclipse fold any code other than the big comment block at the top of every source file. I wouldn't be opposed to integrating SVN awareness into it, but find it a bit problematic since I'm using SVN over SSH.