IDE for beginner

[angeluslii]

Which IDE would you recommend for a beginner doing C programming
possibly one which would work with Windows Vista and does syntax
highlighting?

 

[Chris Hills]

Which IDE would you recommend for a beginner doing C programming
possibly one which would work with Windows Vista and does syntax
highlighting?

How about the one that comes with the compiler? Most development suites
have an IDE as part of the package.

Virtually all have syntax highlighting

As for working with Vista.... I would stick with XP for the next 12
months.

 

[osmium]

Which IDE would you recommend for a beginner doing C programming
possibly one which would work with Windows Vista and does syntax
highlighting?

If the guys at Microsoft didn't mess up, DevC would work on Vista and be a
good choice. It has syntax highlighting that I like. Some of the others I
have used try to tell me more than I want to know - its just noise after a
while.

Poke around on this site.

http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html

 

[osmium]

As for working with Vista.... I would stick with XP for the next 12
months.

I was thinking more like ten years than 12 months. How do you do that?
Don't all the vendors with good prices migrate to Vista and that's all you
can get without a lot of effort? Is there an "XP store" someplace?

 

[Richard Heathfield]

osmium said:

I was thinking more like ten years than 12 months. How do you do
that? Don't all the vendors with good prices migrate to Vista and
that's all you
can get without a lot of effort? Is there an "XP store" someplace?

For the very best prices, leave Windows behind - you know you want to -
and instead use something that works. Alternatively, if you feel
obliged to continue paying for the privilege of using an inferior
product, please at least try to post details of your traumatic
experiences only in newsgroups where they are relevant. Thanks.

 

[Chris Hills]

I was thinking more like ten years than 12 months.

How do you do that?

It depends where you are in the world. There are quite a few shops that
will *legally* install the OEM XP-SP2 )home or pro) for you

Don't all the vendors with good prices migrate to Vista and that's all you
can get without a lot of effort?

Maybe.... Note everyone is upgrading to Vista. As it needs a lot of HW
it will be over a year before people upgrade HW and even then they will
still have older machines with XP.

I still have a lot of customers working on win 98SE and 2K.

Is there an "XP store" someplace?

See above.

 

[Chris Hills]

If the guys at Microsoft didn't mess up, DevC would work on Vista and be a
good choice.

It depends what his target is and what he wants to do.

It has syntax highlighting that I like. Some of the others I
have used try to tell me more than I want to know - its just noise after a
while.

That is a good point.

Some people STILL use Vi and Emacs

 

[Chris Hills]

osmium said:


For the very best prices, leave Windows behind - you know you want to -
and instead use something that works.

There are quite a few VERY good operating systems for X86 machines.
Solaris is free for non-commercial use.
BSD Unix is also available. FREE AFAIK

Both of which are vastly superior to Linux
(lights blue touch paper and runs
OSX now runs on x86
There are a few others.
So there is a choice.

Alternatively, if you feel
obliged to continue paying for the privilege of using an inferior
product, please at least try to post details of your traumatic
experiences only in newsgroups where they are relevant. Thanks.

For a novie I suppose, depending on what he wants to do, is MS VC++
Express which is free.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Chris Hills said:

There are quite a few VERY good operating systems for X86 machines.

Yes - but are any of them written by Microsoft?

Solaris is free for non-commercial use.
BSD Unix is also available. FREE AFAIK

Both of which are vastly superior to Linux
(lights blue touch paper and runs

<shrug> Whatever works. If it truly is even a little superior to Linux,
it must be astounding.

Having said that, though, I did *try* BSD for a few weeks, and I just
couldn't get on with it. But at least I tried.

 

[Chris Hills]

Chris Hills said:


Yes - but are any of them written by Microsoft?


<shrug> Whatever works. If it truly is even a little superior to Linux,
it must be astounding.

Why? Linux isn't astounding.

Solaris was better than Linux a decade ago. More reliable too.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Chris Hills said:

Why? Linux isn't astounding.

Consider what I'm comparing it to:

* MUSIC
* VM/CMS
* Atari TOS
* AmigaDOS
* MS-DOS
* Pick
* MVS (OS390)
* One or two 'badged' Unices
* Windows (everything from 2.0 "up", except ME and Vista)
* BSD

You say BSD is better, and I'm prepared to believe it despite not having
got on with it very well myself. Nevertheless, when I compare Linux to
the others on that list, they all come off very badly indeed in my
experience. I am overwhelmingly satisfied with Linux in a way that I
never was with any of the others (except for the Win32 API, which I do
think is actually very good from a programmer's perspective,
unfashionable though it is to say so).

 

[Chris Hills]

Chris Hills said:


Consider what I'm comparing it to:

* MUSIC
* VM/CMS
* Atari TOS
* AmigaDOS
* MS-DOS
* Pick
* MVS (OS390)
* One or two 'badged' Unices
* Windows (everything from 2.0 "up", except ME and Vista)
* BSD

You say BSD is better, and I'm prepared to believe it despite not having
got on with it very well myself. Nevertheless, when I compare Linux to
the others on that list, they all come off very badly indeed in my
experience. I am overwhelmingly satisfied with Linux in a way that I
never was with any of the others (except for the Win32 API, which I do
think is actually very good from a programmer's perspective,
unfashionable though it is to say so).

Try comparing Solaris with Linux then

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

RH> Having said that, though, I did *try* BSD for a few weeks, and
RH> I just couldn't get on with it. But at least I tried.

My impression is that *BSD and Linux have complementary strengths and
weaknesses, though for a reasonable variety of usage patterns they
tend to average each other out; a particular person's preference tends
to have more to do with which one that person imprinted on first.

Charlton

 

[Clever Monkey]

Chris Hills said:


Consider what I'm comparing it to:

* MUSIC
* VM/CMS
* Atari TOS
* AmigaDOS
* MS-DOS
* Pick
* MVS (OS390)
* One or two 'badged' Unices
* Windows (everything from 2.0 "up", except ME and Vista)
* BSD

You say BSD is better, and I'm prepared to believe it despite not having
got on with it very well myself. Nevertheless, when I compare Linux to
the others on that list, they all come off very badly indeed in my
experience. I am overwhelmingly satisfied with Linux in a way that I
never was with any of the others (except for the Win32 API, which I do
think is actually very good from a programmer's perspective,
unfashionable though it is to say so).

Hmmm. Even the various time/date APIs?

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Chris Hills said:

Try comparing Solaris with Linux then

I'll take your word for it. I'm happy with what I've got. It works just
fine, it understands me, I understand it (enough), it's robust enough,
and the price is perfect. Yes, okay, maybe there's even better stuff
out there, but one can only spend so much time checking out OSs. There
are so many other things to be done...

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Clever Monkey said:

Richard Heathfield wrote:

Hmmm. Even the various time/date APIs?

Sure. They can be a bit clumsy sometimes, but they're comprehensive and
easy to understand.

 

[Mark McIntyre]

Solaris was better than Linux a decade ago. More reliable too.

A decade ago, VMS was better than *anything*. Comparisons a decade old
are as much use as the proverbial fireguard.

As for Solaris today, its a fine OS. Better than Linux? Impossible to
say, since most Solaris is run on Sparc and most linux on x86. Solaris
is rubbish at being a utility OS on a thousand $500 units in a compute
grid. Linux is rubbish at running on a 48-CPU Ultrasparc 4+ with 64GB
of memory. Its like saying "C is better than C++" without defining
for what, on what, and by what criteria. Golly, I managed to get
obtopical.
--
Mark McIntyre

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
--Brian Kernighan

 

[Mark McIntyre]

Vendors practically get paid to preinstall vista because MS needs to
show massive salesfigures to make their shareholders happy about the
sunk costs. But you can trivially get XP or Linux if you want it - go
ask Dell for instance.

Maybe.... Note everyone is upgrading to Vista. As it needs a lot of HW
it will be over a year before people upgrade HW and even then they will
still have older machines with XP.

In my case, never.
--
Mark McIntyre

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
--Brian Kernighan

 

[Malcolm McLean]

osmium said:


For the very best prices, leave Windows behind - you know you want to -
and instead use something that works. Alternatively, if you feel
obliged to continue paying for the privilege of using an inferior
product, please at least try to post details of your traumatic
experiences only in newsgroups where they are relevant. Thanks.

Which is here.
Normally I am not an "early adopter". However we had a talk from some
marketing person who spoke about the various market segments, and I thought
that just for once I'd be an early adopter. So I bought a Vista machine the
first week they came out.
It was a terrible decision. The MSVC 6.0 compiler has been broekn -
obviously deliberately. That's the compiler all the undergraduates use at
the university. Microsoft have tried to compete with the free software
foundation by releasing a free compiler. You've got to allow them to make
any modifications they want to your system to use it. I've no illegal
software or music so that's no problem. However it is cluntsy and difficult
to use and won't even pass round ASCII strings correctly, obviously because
they don't want to give a real compiler away for free. So far I have
achieved absolutely nothing useful with it, despite spend whole days
downloading the SDK (no documentation of course), fiddling with the brand
new C++-like GUI, seeing what happens with and without stdafx.h file etc etc
etc.
OK some of this is my fault because I am not good at getting tools to work.
I still can't touch type, for example. But Vista is a horrid develoment
platform. clc subsribers beware.

 

[Carramba]

(e-mail address removed) skrev:

Which IDE would you recommend for a beginner doing C programming
possibly one which would work with Windows Vista and does syntax
highlighting?

I would sugest using http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ (use lates 4 RC1) with
http://www.cygwin.com/ if you are using XP.
works very well, and you *get unix* on XP.
Have many greate futures and templates that you can build this saves a
lot of time , besides own syntax highlighting and code formatting.

cheers!