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FOSDEM Interviews On Free Development Tools
FOSDEM writes "The Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting folks, aka FOSDEM, have just released the second part of their speakers' interviews. These interviews are dedicated to their development tools track, with Andreas Zeller for ddd, Benoit Minisini for Gambas and Alexander Dymo & Harald Fernengel for kdevelop. Previous interviews were already discussed on Slashdot here"
The general problem is that those are usually built by true experts, that is people who know their programming inside out. The tools are built to "scratch a personal itch" thus they are generally very powerfull but not so userfriendly.
Wast majority of people doing any sort of programming in the world are quite frankly not that good. Thus they need easy, preconfigured tools that will help them do the basically simple things they have to do, but that seem so difficult and intimidating to them.
Wast majority of people doing any sort of programming in the world are quite frankly not that good. Thus they need easy, preconfigured tools that will help them do the basically simple things they have to do, but that seem so difficult and intimidating to them.
What a crock.
If "having easy, preconfigured tools that will help me do the basically simple thing I need to do" makes someone dumb/lazy/whatever, sign me up.
I don't want tools that could do something, or that can be tweaked to do something, or that can do something if you add other tools. I want tools that do what I want, right now.
Saying that those tools nearly exist, or can exist with some work, is saying that the DO NOT exist - only it makes it sound better to some OS folks.
(lover of jEdit, gnumake, etc)
Maybe I'm not very good. Maybe that's a result of my job, where 20% of the time is programming and the rest of the time is tons of other stuff that keeps the company running smoothly. I've had to learn like many different programming languages over the years. Powerful autocomplete helps clear the cobwebs. If you mostly program in Java, do you remember your C++? How about javascript /PHP /perl and all of the other web languages, how about all of the associated standard and custom libraries? Sure I can read a man page, or heck, a paper page to remember the arguments; but why should I? Good autocomplete will tell you the function arguments, their types, reference styles and return values as you type. You simply cannot compare this to anything that requires additional keystrokes, window changes, book opening. I know the syntax, I know how to program effectively, but what was the name of that function? Did it take one argument,2 or 20? Modern programming requires access to a lot of information, and autocomplete is one of the best things I've seen. Add to that an annotated class/library browser and wow, holy productivity.
Being an effective programmer often means picking up new tools. As these new tools inevitably come with reams of new functions / objects etc. Having a powerful editor flattens the learning curve greatly. How much quicker is it to become productive in a New language when you have autocomplete?
btw: the point of this message is not 'difficult and itimidating', the point is 'getting the job done'. If having imperfect memory means 'frankly not being good', then welcome to the human race, mate.