Posted by
HeUnique
on from the good-progress dept.
I just got the message - Kdevelop 1.1 is out, along with KDK (KDE Development Kit), Kdbg (KDebug 1.0.2) and other goodies for you to enjoy. Also, Martin Konold from the KDE development team sent some pictures from CeBit - worth a look.
I'm a big fan of the KDevelop project. However, one request I would make is to have customizable code-editing widgets. KWrite is a nice widget to use, but it is simply notepad with colors -- not very many advanced features for the seasoned hacker.
If someone could hack vim into a Qt or KDE widget, for use in KDevelop or stand-alone, then I would be impressed. Such a task seems more than trivial, now that I've tried it, because it seems the vim code is not exactly event-driven (or so I gather from some vim developers.)
I downloaded the beta of Kdevelop 1.1. Kdevelop will make people coming from a Windows and VC++ environment really happy, since it offers a similar style of programming and GUI design. Kdevelop will also attract a lot of developers to the Qt toolkit, since it makes it pretty easy to use Qt.
Of course, I'm not entirely sure why this is a good thing. GNU&Linux wasn't built or used by people who approached programming that way. Is KDevelop going to bring a lot of developers from Windows to Linux? What kind of changes will they want in Linux? And what will that mean to the traditional GNU&Linux communities?
I think there is a lot of interesting stuff to be done in the traditional text-based GNU/Linux/UNIX approach to programming. Here are just some simple ideas:
a working command line version of cextract for C++
a better version of make that determines and manages dependencies among C/C++ files faster, more automatically, and more reliably than existing approaches
a constraint and rule-based language for specifying GUIs in your favorite toolkit
an SML-style module system for C (and maybe C++), integrated with a make-like facility
integrating the C/C++ bounds checking hacks into the main branch of GNU C and figuring out a good way of making that backwards compatible with old libraries
KDevelop is glitzy. It's a big and impressive development effort. It's probably useful for people who want to build Windows-like applications with a Windows-like IDE. I can even see why people have fun developing it.
But, ultimately, KDevelop looks foreign to me in a UNIX environment and less useful for traditional UNIX uses and users. I'd like to see more effort go into building tools in the traditional UNIX style (and I'm trying to help when I can).
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I'm a big fan of the KDevelop project. However, one request I would make is to have customizable code-editing widgets. KWrite is a nice widget to use, but it is simply notepad with colors -- not very many advanced features for the seasoned hacker.
If someone could hack vim into a Qt or KDE widget, for use in KDevelop or stand-alone, then I would be impressed. Such a task seems more than trivial, now that I've tried it, because it seems the vim code is not exactly event-driven (or so I gather from some vim developers.)
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Of course, I'm not entirely sure why this is a good thing. GNU&Linux wasn't built or used by people who approached programming that way. Is KDevelop going to bring a lot of developers from Windows to Linux? What kind of changes will they want in Linux? And what will that mean to the traditional GNU&Linux communities?
I think there is a lot of interesting stuff to be done in the traditional text-based GNU/Linux/UNIX approach to programming. Here are just some simple ideas:
KDevelop is glitzy. It's a big and impressive development effort. It's probably useful for people who want to build Windows-like applications with a Windows-like IDE. I can even see why people have fun developing it.
But, ultimately, KDevelop looks foreign to me in a UNIX environment and less useful for traditional UNIX uses and users. I'd like to see more effort go into building tools in the traditional UNIX style (and I'm trying to help when I can).