Re: IDEs, syntactic vs. semantic highlighting, etc. (was Re: What is your favourite IDE? Eclipse DLTK!)

On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 01:27:28AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

I've been programming a long time, and there were in fact a number of
times when I was on what were essentially one-person one-language
couple-of-month projects. But the last time I can remember was a FORTRAN
port of a finite element code I did in the late 1980s. Since then,
nearly every programming project I've been part of has involved multiple
programmers and multiple languages. And FORTRAN (77) is probably the
last language I ever used where I could claim with a straight face that
I knew *all* the syntax and semantics.

So that's why there *must* be IDEs. Nobody works *alone* and nobody
knows it *all*. As I've said before, I think I can make a case for the
Linux desktop as an IDE. I have my choice of two mainstream programmers'
editors, vim and emacs, all of the languages (except Visual Basic),
compilers, debuggers, Acroread, "info" and "man" to read the manuals
(since I don't know all the syntax and semantics), SVN, CVS and a few
other version control systems, and many other intra-team communications
tools.

I don't agree that one needs IDEs for multi-language, multi-person
projects, unless (as you say) a free unix OS like Linux qualifies as
an IDE. I've made the statement before that my Debian GNU/Linux machine
(which has since suffered unrecoverable hardware failure -- now I'm
using a FreeBSD machine for the same purposes) was my IDE, but any time
I say that I tend to get people telling me it doesn't count as an IDE.



But what I'd *really* like is a language and an implementation of that
language that *was* an IDE! The closest thing to that I've ever seen is
the intricate entwining of Lisp and Emacs, and that, in a kind of
linear, one-dimensional, "auditory" way, is the core concept. But expand
that -- data structures other than the linked list, two-dimensional and
three-dimensional diagrams, color, stereo sound, animation. And, of
course, it needs to be open source. :)

Isn't that what Smalltalk does? It combines the language and the IDE in
one convenient package. I'm sure I've seen a couple other languages do
the same sort of thing, but at the moment I'm drawing a blank on what
they might have been, specifically.

Anyway, I'd rather code Lisp in Vim any day of the week.

--
CD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
MacUser, Nov 1990: "There comes a time in the history of any project
when it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production."

.

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