informat IDE survey

[Lew]

Patrick May wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

Emacs and CUA user interfaces.

And that's different from an IDE how?

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

Actually, they're pretty experienced. Most of the fighting I see
is when new versions of any component of their tool chain come out,
although I do see them occasionally having to restart their IDE to fix
some problem or other.

Call me skeptical then that they are really spending all that much time
"fighting" with their IDEs. The amount of time I spend installing or
updating any IDE plugins is somewhere well below 1 percent of all my
working hours.

Restarting happens. Quite infrequently if you avoid or uninstall flaky
plugins, and if you don't leave your IDE open for a month at a time.

In practical terms, I have sat in several train-the-trainers
sessions for new product releases and found that, using Emacs plus
command line builds, I routinely finish the exercises before any of the
IDE users and have time to explore more features. This productivity is
also apparent in production development environments.

YMMV, of course.

Regards,

Patrick

True enough, everyone's mileage will vary. I certainly take you at your
word that you on Emacs are faster than the colleagues you've observed
using IDEs. Based on my personal experience using Emacs, vi and flavours
thereof, a bunch of other programmer's text editors, and dozens of IDEs
for many different languages, I'm very skeptical of the general claim
that a proficient developer, who uses only Emacs and command line to
work in Java (and I'm including complex Java EE projects here including
deployment), can be faster than an equally proficient developer using
only a modern full-featured Java IDE.

The only way I could see that is if you've so tooled up and customized
your Emacs that it *is* a Java/Java EE IDE.

AHS
--
That's not the recollection that I recall...All this information is
certainly in the hands of the auditor and we certainly await his report
to indicate what he deems has occurred.
-- Halifax, Nova Scotia mayor Peter Kelly, who is currently deeply in
the shit

 

[Tom Anderson]

Corrallary: Not using print/log statements to debug code.

Not only are log statements often a much faster way to debug, they are
permanent and therefore can be reused later, used when you have new and
different problems, and also can be used by other programmers or later
in a product's life cycle, i.e. maintenance.

You guys are hillarious. You should go and spend some time with some
Smalltalk guys who do *all* their programming in the debugger. You'd drop
that crusty old anti-debuggerist inverse snobbery like a shot.

tom

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Well, let's see, I need to do that _inside_ a Java IDE about once every
5 years. Considering that the operation of executing a shell command and
inserting its output into a file I can do in a Linux/Mac OS X terminal
or a Windows Powershell window, I don't think I'm missing much here.

Which is fine with a few tens of lines or possibly even hundreds of lines.
But when you have to do that with thousands of lines, you start to
appreciate being able to spit them out straight into an editor buffer.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On 20/03/11 20:04, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

You need to spend time learning how to use an IDE.

Spoken like a true non-Emacs user.

is a messy hack.

Yup, definitely knows little or nothing about Emacs.

is of very little advantage in windowed systems.

Au contraire, as I have explained elsewhere.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I won't deny that. But let's look at the original terms of reference for
this thread, which I'm trying to stick to: IDE's for writing Java code.

Is that all you do, day in and day out? That kind of limited focus is what
gives people the impression that computer programming is a boring,
repetitive activity.

I use a text editor for lots of things—writing code in several different
languages, system administration, documentation ... I have even used Emacs
to patch binary files (proprietary software ... sigh). The whole purpose of
a computer is to perform tedious and repetitive tasks so I don’t have to,
and I find that Emacs is just one of the many wonderful things to have on a
computer for that reason.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

One of the bugs I am discovering hides longest is writing regex
patterns that find only 99% of the instances they should. Often the
problematic case does not exist anywhere at the time I write the code.
It only shows up later.

I don’t think I have ever written a regular expression complicated enough to
have that problem. For any situation like that, I would almost certainly
resort to a hand-coded state machine parser.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I'm claiming that on average neither I nor you nor anyone else can
concentrate on writing a specific line of code and at the same time on
the overall architecture that line of code is part of. It's like the
forest and the trees.

While my fingers are typing trees, my brain is seeing forest.

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

Is that all you do, day in and day out? That kind of limited focus is what
gives people the impression that computer programming is a boring,
repetitive activity.

No, writing code is not all I do, day in and day out. I do what I am
paid to do, which is to help clients rescue poorly-designed,
poorly-implemented and poorly-tested applications on the one hand, and
attempt to create well-designed and properly-implemented/tested systems
for clients on the other hand. Neither of those efforts is completely or
even mostly about coding.

However, the thread is about Java IDEs, and morphed somewhat into a
general discussion of writing Java in various environments. That's why
I'm keeping it focused on Java and the tasks involved in coding Java.

I mean, we could have a discussion about using ActiveState Python versus
using Emacs for Python, but it's outside the scope of this thread.

I use a text editor for lots of things—writing code in several different
languages, system administration, documentation ... I have even used Emacs
to patch binary files (proprietary software ... sigh). The whole purpose of
a computer is to perform tedious and repetitive tasks so I don’t have to,
and I find that Emacs is just one of the many wonderful things to have on a
computer for that reason.

I'm not dissing Emacs, and I occasionally use Emacs although I find its
philosophy old-fashioned. As someone else suggested in this thread Emacs
isn't particularly compelling *now* - it made a lot more sense some
decades ago. I'm happy for you that you still like it, and I trust that
if you've been using it for a long, long time that you are quite
productive with it despite its faults.

AHS
--
That's not the recollection that I recall...All this information is
certainly in the hands of the auditor and we certainly await his report
to indicate what he deems has occurred.
-- Halifax, Nova Scotia mayor Peter Kelly, who is currently deeply in
the shit

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

Which is fine with a few tens of lines or possibly even hundreds of lines.
But when you have to do that with thousands of lines, you start to
appreciate being able to spit them out straight into an editor buffer.

And why do I need to have this stuff inside an editor at all? If I am
looking to process it with command-line tools I can do that on the
command-line, oddly enough. You're making it out to be a virtue that you
can run command-lines from inside your text editor...I can in fact do
that from a quite a few editors, not just Emacs, but what's the huge
value-added here?

If I do need to manually (as in visually) edit the output, then it's
easy enough to fire up Notepad++ or vi on the file.

It's entirely possible that you do some kind of repetitive file
crunching in some niche clerical capacity for which these capabilities
are well-suited. For my part I've been doing business and scientific
programming since the late '70's and I still can't think of the scenario
where I'd deeply appreciate being able to dump thousands of lines of
tool output into my editor buffer...versus just doing C.L. operations.

Perhaps you could provide a realistic example or two. Educate me.

AHS
--
That's not the recollection that I recall...All this information is
certainly in the hands of the auditor and we certainly await his report
to indicate what he deems has occurred.
-- Halifax, Nova Scotia mayor Peter Kelly, who is currently deeply in
the shit

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

And why do I need to have this stuff inside an editor at all?

Because I was creating a text file out of it.

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

But you can do that just as quickly and easily from the command line,
so where's the huge advantage of doing it from within the editor?

There just aren't even nearly enough Ctrl-, Meta- and other key-combos
involved in: mytool > output.txt ;-) (Just kidding.)

I guess he meant including the output of some command into some text
that he is already editing.

 

[Peter Stiernström]

Mind, there are a couple of things from Emacs I really _do_ miss when
working in Eclipse's editor: splitting the editor window into multiple
panes easily and conveniently, having different panes refer to the
different positions in the same file, and Emac's way of doing cutting
and pasting (the kill ring).

I'm foremost an emacs user but I thought that the Emacs+ plugin to
eclipse handled splitting along with all the nice emacs editing
keybindings. I only recently looked into it as I was contemplating
having to program in Java.

For me though, the principal attraction of Emacs will forever be elisp
and the speed with which you can accomodate new editing needs.

In conclusion I think they both have significant strength and luckily
nobody has to chose one over the other.

/Peter

 

[Daniele Futtorovic]

While my fingers are typing trees, my brain is seeing forest.

Yeah, that's definitely the impression I get from you: disjunct.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

But you can do that just as quickly and easily from the command line ...

Not really, no.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Emacs is my preferred text editor, but I generally don't use it for
programming purposes, except for quick-and-dirty changes. I normally use
Eclipse. Or, for Microsoftish stuff, I'll use Visual Studio.

Why? Are the GUI environments slow to start?

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

Not really, no.

Dude, this sub-thread originally stemmed from you touting

"Being able to execute a shell command and insert its output directly
into a text buffer."

as a benefit of Emacs. We're also informed, by you, that the purpose of
so doing is

"Because I was creating a text file out of it."

You're now, for the record, claiming that it's faster to run shell
commands in Emacs to create a text file, than it is to run shell
commands on the *command line* to create a text file. It's also
apparently more difficult, according to you, to run these shell commands
on the command line than it is in Emacs.

Why not just come straight out and admit that you'd rather pound nails
into your forehead than use a prole tool like an IDE? It's OK, we all
have our snob moments.

AHS
--
That's not the recollection that I recall...All this information is
certainly in the hands of the auditor and we certainly await his report
to indicate what he deems has occurred.
-- Halifax, Nova Scotia mayor Peter Kelly, who is currently deeply in
the shit

 

[Nigel Wade]

Spoken like a true non-Emacs user.

Certainly not any more. I progressed beyond it 15 years ago. But, hey,
you stick with the tools you are capable of using.

Yup, definitely knows little or nothing about Emacs.

I worked with Emacs for long enough to know all it's shortcomings.
Sufficiently so that I was glad to see the back of it when windowed
systems relegated it to the realms of obscurity it so deserved. There is
nothing about Emacs that I miss, and just about everything that I'm glad
to see the back of.

Au contraire, as I have explained elsewhere.

Actually, you have explained nothing. Merely stated your (as yet
unsubstantiated) opinion. Your continued refusal to back up your stated
opinion with fact is beginning to make it look baseless.

 

[Lars Enderin]

I worked with Emacs for long enough to know all it's shortcomings.
Sufficiently so that I was glad to see the back of it when windowed
systems relegated it to the realms of obscurity it so deserved. There is
nothing about Emacs that I miss, and just about everything that I'm glad
to see the back of.

Emacs *is* a windowed system. You can use mouse commands. It can be used
without windows, though, if you don't have X or GTK. Apparently it was
too advanced for you.

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

Emacs *is* a windowed system. You can use mouse commands. It can be used
without windows, though, if you don't have X or GTK. Apparently it was
too advanced for you.

We all know, emacs is a fully-fledged OS on its own. The only thing it
lacks, though, is a decent editor... ;-)