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KDE Releases KDevelop 4.6
New submitter KDE Community writes that the KDE project has released KDevelop 4.6.0 as the latest version of the free and open source integrated development environment.
"KDevelop 4.6.0 improves debugging support with GDB. The GDB integration improvements include some operations now going into effect immediately rather than needing to re-run the program, improved debugging from external terminals, and a CPU registers toolview. KDevelopers' CPU registers toolview also allows for showing and editing all user-mode registers and general purpose flags for x86/x86_64/ARMv7 platforms. Other KDevelop 4.6.0 changes include greater language support within the PHP plug-in, Python language support improvements, more C++11 language support, improved project management, and a clean-up to the IDE's user-interface."
Obviously, these KDE people want to blow stuff up.
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I....guess i see.
I agree, I've been a Windows c# programmer for 10 years and never had a single use for Visual Studio. All I do is edit code, compile and run, no joke.
... because a *good* IDE can make you so much more productive. Yes, vim is great, yes, it can do a lot, but it still does not know what you are writing there.
My IDE does and thanks to that I can refactor stuff in seconds that took minutes earlier (or maybe even hours) and I make less mistakes doing so. Having to spend less time on boring tasks makes the whole job of programming something so much more enjoyable!
You need a good IDE though with a good code model, so that it actually understands the code you are writing. Many of the free IDEs do not have that, so those are a total waste of time. KDevelop, Eclipse and Qt Creator all have a code model though and do support you with quite a few refactoring operations (like move code around, rename variables and classes, etc.).
Do they have a sane template selection yet? The last few times I've tried KDevelop, in order to get anything done in Java or C, I essentially had to roll my own.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
Ever heard of keyboard shortcuts? Yeah, IDEs have these, too.
Good call. Maybe the NSA should infiltrate open source projects and make sure there aren't any terrorists. They'll need to gain trust by spending a few years fixing bugs and adding new features.
Also, even though the NSA is watching my online activity and phone calls/location, they can't always tell what I'm doing offline. I suggest they assign two or three girlfriends to monitor me. I like nerdy mathematical types so I'm sure they can find someone. I'm usually more talkative after mind-blowing sex, so it will work out good for both of us.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I used to love ActiveState Komodo IDE for PHP, back in version 6. They did some redesign for V7+ that just killed performance, though. 'What does performance have to do with IDEs', one may ask. Massive input lag, and the like. It's that bad.
Sad, too. It was great.
Ever considered that an interface which is by design keyboard-driven is infinitely superior to a mouse-focussed GUI which also happens to offer some keyboard shortcuts? It's just not comparable.
For instance, what shortcut would you use for even something utterly trivial as 'delete N lines downwards'? Whatever shortcut that might be, you'd very likely end up hitting the same key combo N times.
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KDevelop uses Kate as its editing component, which has a Vim emulation mode. Using this Vim mode, you would just do
(N-1)j
e.g.
4j
to delete 5 lines downwards. Additionally, KDevelop has probably the best C++ navigation/ code completion I've ever seen in an open-source IDE - it's a huge productivity booster for me.
Yeah we get it, you're 1337. See above response about Vim emulation in Katepart and shut up, thanks.
Clearly you underestimate the significance of being able to quickly refactor code. Of course, if you always write 100% correct code flawlessly the first time, this may not ever be an issue for you. Most human beings, however, suffer from flaws like imperfection... and having an automated device that compensates for that by remembering way more for you than you ever could possibly hope to at one time while you are writing your code is pretty damn convenient for a lot of people.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What makes you think text editors with a GUI are not keyboard usable? Get out of your cave! You might be surprised, but people working on an IDE are programmers... they do like the keyboard, too.
KDevelop even has vim-compatibility via its kate texteditor component. Eclipse has vim plugin, as does Qt Creator, which even ships with a "fakevim" plugin installed and enabled by default.
Qt Creator's main navigation method, the locator which will take you to any symbol/class/file/line/web page/...) is entirely keyboard based (trigger it with Ctrl-K, not the mouse though, that would kind of spoil the effect).
I use my IDE of choice almost completely without the mouse: The only time I grab the mouse is when browsing the help (that feels too much like browsing the web to avoid the mouse;-).
Is it somehow some sort of a heinous sin to be more vastly productive with an IDE? Sure, a good programmer may not really *need* an IDE to technically be able to simply do the functions of their job... but a good IDE can still save that programmer a whole lot of time while doing that job, and bearing in mind that the real world has things like deadlines... and programmers still need to do things like pay bills and most of them like to eat at least occasionally, so they need to finish those jobs on time, and not take 5 or 10 times longer on a large scale project than it would have if they had been using an IDE.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> I found that a good editor made me much more productive.
A good text editor certainly helps, but a good IDE helps a lot more. After all it is basically a *intelligent* text editor plus some extra tools in one consistent package.
> I'd argue that it's not the job of my tools to understand my code for me. The coder is the guy to have to understand the code.
Nope, the co-worker of the coder has to understand the code.
And the compiler has to understand your code, too. And other specialized tools like bison/flex, make, etc. There are lots of tools in your work flow that need to make sense of -- at least some -- of the stuff you write.
> That being said, I wouldn't even /want/ to have my text editor understand my code for me, because it's a text editor.
No IDE in the world can understand your code for you. All it can do is to help you to understand your code better. And it can also help working with that code.
> Oh wow. Yeah, what's having to use a notepad-style integrated text editor
You have not used a UI in the last couple of years, did you? There are quite a few really powerful UI based text editors that are at least feature compatible with vim and emacs or even leave those in the dust. Some of the best are actually built into IDEs these days.
> [...] when you can /refactor/ your code with just one click!
I actually have this thing on my desk that people call a keyboard. It is basically a lot of mouse buttons right next to each other... if I press the right ones in the correct sequence then refactoring happens. I do not even have to click. Slick, isen't it?
If you need a mouse to use your IDE, then you are obviously doing it wrong -- or you are stuck in a really sucky IDE.
> Refactoring, again. Is there any other reason to use an IDE or is it all about refactoring?
You can write new code with almost any text editor.
Debugging that code? Understanding the code? Deploying it to some mobile phone or remote machine? Refactoring that code? An IDE is *way* ahead for any of those tasks.
> FWIW, i found that a tiling window manager like i3 and some xterms make up for a way superior development environment than any IDE i've seen so far (and I have seen a few).
Yeap, tiling WMs rock and terminals are a must have, I fully agree there. But I would still not want to miss out on my IDE.
Because that's a common use case. OK, me editing your code it probably is.
Made me laugh, thanks.
[...] when it comes to parsing, even to related plugins, editors suck big time.
When it comes to audio playback, audio encoders suck big time. See the analogy?
@Parent's siblings: You're proving my point by pointing out how you can get kinda-sorta-vi-ish-emulation into your fancy IDEs. (I've seen a bunch of those tools and they all suck big time)
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Wouldn't I need to be a gamer for 1337ness?
I'm surprised by your weird reaction -- oh wait, you're using some vi-emulation. Yeah, those kind of make me angry too, for all the features they lack.
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That's not a sufficient condition. Your code has to be 100% correct and your design has to be 100% correct and your requirements can't ever change and your (target and development) environment can't ever change.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Refactoring has nothing to do with improving correctness. Besides, being faster at refactoring is an entirely unverified claim on which I call bullshit.
On a broken codebase, which has lot of cross-module dependencies, global variables all over the place, shadowed by local variables here and there -- yeah, your full-parse fancy refactor thingy might get it faster. OTOH, that's not code I'd want to work with, and/or be proud of.
Any code written with a minimal reasonable amount of common sense and sanity, is quickly refactored right in the editor, for local parts, or with a combination of grep(1) find(1) and sed(1).
Big deal.
Learning how to use a couple unix programs sort of elimiates the need for a lot of programs previously considered indispensible.
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Can't really think of a time where I had to "delete the next N lines" - but "expanding selection to next enclosing scope" or "word boundary", and either deleting or copying or cutting that? Or moving the current line, or currently selected lines up and down? That happens a lot... and my IDEs have shortcuts for that.
And then there's the neat stuff that's hard to do in a non-IDE, like efficient navigation (including jumping to one of multiple possible concrete implementations of an interface).
Sure, vim is neat for editing dumb config files over a SSH connection, but I don't get why people don't want to use the best tools for the job when it comes to programming... simple manipulation of text is probably what I spend the least amount of time on while doing development stuff.
Coffee-driven development.
Look, there are two approaches to software: the One-Tool-Does-It-All approach which we're familiar with from the Windows world. IDEs are an incarnation of this approach.
Then there's the One-Tool-For-One-Job approach, which focusses on flexibility - we know this from the unix world.
It isn't a ``heinous sin'' to think you're vastly more productive with an IDE (although most people making that claim simply do not know their unix toolbox). If you like the monolithic approach, fine.
Contrary, it's not a sin either to prefer the other (and arguably older, [hint hint, GP]) approach.
That being said, please stop tring to point out how much faster you actually are using an IDE, when in actuality you only know one side of the picture.
And yes, I used IDEs, for years, and then stopped using IDEs, years ago.
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My point about correctness was more along the lines of being writing code that didn't ever need to be changed after it was first written.
As for refactoring, try using just those tools to rename an identifier that is not, by itself, globally unique, but could nonetheless be uniquely identified by software that can understand the syntax of the language, and can realize the context of every single statement and identifier automatically.
Sure, you *CAN* do this by hand... but using a tool to accomplish it over a project that may be hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code, spanning several hundred or thousand source files, is going to be orders of magnitude faster and more reliable.
Of course, if program requirements never changed after the initial implementation was written, this probably wouldn't be an issue.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No... it's not.... but I really get tired of seeing people here suggest that programmers who might actually require an IDE to get their jobs done in a timely fashion are somehow less competent as programmers than people who've probably never had to work on large scale projects with schedules that aren't humanly possible to achieve if you were to just use manual tools and a plain text editor.
Whether this is not the programmer's fault is irrelevant... this is how the real world of software development actually is... and a programmer who doesn't get the job done in the time that he's expected to do so is soon going to find himself unemployed. Call me picky... but I would rather be able to afford to keep a roof over my head and eat than brag about being such an awesome programmer that I don't need modern software development environments like an IDE to get a job done.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hmm, I wonder where this value is being used... No no, not this variable in particular, but he value it contains, also, where it comes from. a few dozen million lines of code, the value crossing module boundaries, being passed around from object to object, injected, going through constructors and public properties...
Oh that's going to be fun with grep/find/sed.
Writing code is the most trivial part of software development. Reading/Maintaining it, no matter how awesome the people who initially wrote it are, is a totally different thing.
No... it's not.... but I really get tired of seeing people here suggest that programmers who might actually require an IDE to get their jobs done in a timely fashion are somehow less competent as programmers than
Ah, here it goes again:
people who've probably never had to work on large scale projects with schedules that aren't humanly possible to achieve if you were to just use manual tools and a plain text editor.
...did you by any chance not read the post you're replying to? Stop pretending like IDEs would naturally boost productivity, when you simply don't know both sides of the issue. I'd actually be slower using an IDE. And in no fucking way would one /ever/ need to have a grasp of the entire code base in order to work on something. When i work on a project, i work on a specific subsystem of said project. If that subsystem still consists of over 9000 lines of code, i /again/ can usually narrow down the part I need to understand to a particular feature of said subsystem, eventually arriving at a managably-sized piece of code, which i then try to understand, and edit. At the 'editing' part, i usually don't need any code-specific help from my editor anymore - what i want there, is minimizing the amount of typework I have to do.
Of course, if the code base is arbitrarily messed up and convoluted, things become different. But then again, two wrongs do not make a right.
And if your coding paradigm is ``type-something-and-then-let-stupidisense-figure-it-out'', then you're generally doing it wrong.
Whether this is not the programmer's fault is irrelevant... this is how the real world of software development actually is... and a programmer who doesn't get the job done in the time that he's expected to do so is soon going to find himself unemployed. Call me picky... but I would rather be able to afford to keep a roof over my head and eat than brag about being such an awesome programmer that I don't need modern software development environments like an IDE to get a job done.
That's again all implying a programmer who doesn't use an IDE is somehow not able to get the job done in similar time. In messed-up cases that might be true, but in general it's simply wrong. Just because you can't picture it, it need not be impossible. News at 11.
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manual tools and a plain text editor.
Said 'manual tools' are typically non-interactive and hence very automatic, especially in pipelined combination.
The text editor is hardly 'plain', it's highly functional.
You seem to know your stuff very well.
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Programmers that need an IDE are crappy programmers by definition.
If you can't manually refactor, debug, compile and build your code, you don't know what you are doing and should probably stop.
That said, an IDE can be a help in some cases and using one doesn't automatically make you a crappy programmer.
It's the programmers that can't do anything without an IDE that are suspect.
IDEs do a lot to make creating software more efficient. Mere typing is trivial, and doesn't generally take the majority of the time. If you can't learn an IDE well enough to appreciate it, you are either a complete idiot or you are writing such trivial software that no one cares about it. Or, possibly, you are using a language for which no (good) IDE exists, but you didn't try that argument, so I'm guessing A or B.
There's a big difference between being able to do something, and being able to do it before you get fired for not being able to finish it just because you think you have some sort of point to prove.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The GP to which you replied is a near-sighted bigot. If he lived in the South, he'd be prime KKK material. For all I know, he's a(n honorary) member in actuality.
Anyone who thinks a few keystrokes is less efficient than piecing together a Unix pipeline that will totally mess up your code is a complete idiot and really isn't worth a second thought.
You said it yourself... "in messed up cases that might be true".
A great deal of the world of software development is made up messed up cases, incomplete and constantly changing functional requirement specifications, and just trying to freaking get the job done before your employer decides to replace you with somebody else who might even be less competent than you, but will tow the company line and work for less money than you will. In my experience, the real world demands results that are not humanly achievable *without* sophisticated software development tools, and that includes using an IDE, helping the programmer to get the job done on time and within budget.
I am entirely able to develop software without an IDE... but I've never once found it very productive to do so for anything larger than toy programs.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is Kdevelop and other KDE/Qt compiler tools now supportive of LLVM/Clang as well, or are they still just GCC only?
The problem is that most IDEs have a limited view of the code, as in smaller editing windows. This is because they have all the tool bars, class views, variable views, and so forth visible. They never reduce to just a few large editing windows. With Emacs I can have 3 very large windows filling up the space on a wide screen monitor and this is very productive. I see people with vi or other straight-up code editors with lots of open windows at a time.
Technically an IDE _could_ do the same thing, but they don't and instead prefer to present a beginner's oriented GUI. To be fair, Emacs _could_ present more IDE features (it has some) but those are either lacking or have similar failures as IDE (lots of child windows).
Another major fault with most IDEs I've seen is that their best features will not be usable unless you build a project the way they want it built. Ie, you need to use their build system, their project management, their compilers, their debuggers. They become clumsy if you need to use external tools. I have seen developers swapping between multiple IDEs for a single project because no single one could manage it all. Trying to adapt a new IDE to an existing project is extremely difficult.
I would like to try a good IDE but I have not found one that does not slow me down to a crawl.
Yes, but what's the percentage of time. If an IDE slows you down to 20% of your normal speed but refactoring is now 500% faster, is it an overall win?
The refactoring won't even work until you first do the prerequisites: getting all your files into the project, setting up a build system with the IDE so that it knows which parts of the files are actually included, and so forth. Only then can you click the magic button and have things work. That's a non starter if you already have an existing project and build system. Then it all breaks in a month because someone adds a file to the system and you forget to add it to your private IDE system (ya, ya, the politically correct approach is to require all developers to use the exact same IDE).
This sort of stuff has been rare for me. Planning head helps a lot. Programmers survived for decades without these tools just fine, we sent people to the moon without Eclipse or Visual Studio. Ie, try to never have global variables, prefer variables that are scoped to the current file or function only, prefer class variables, etc.
For me the bigger refactoring issues are not about renaming but about redesigning an API; adding new parameters for example. Even then the cause for this is most often because of a lack of planning or lack of communication with teammates. The number of times I've needed to do this across more than 4 or 5 files at a time is probably only once a year, with the really massive refactoring changes requiring multiple developers touching a hundred files is maybe every five years.
And the IDEs that do what you describe are very rare, or only work for a particular language. Ie, Eclipse is great for Java, sucky for C.
The sin is to accuse other programmers who do not use your tools of being inferior to you.
Eclipse is terrible, TERRIBLE for java (IntelliJ ftw). I'd be working in VIM too if I had to deal with Eclipse, fortunately I don't.
Yes, if I was working in C++ I'd be using a text editor, as a lot of the tools are unable to follow what complex templates do and whatsnot, but aside for that, most mainstream languages, from C# to Java, going by Python and Ruby, all have IDEs with these functionalities.
I don't care if they're rare, I only need one.
Yes, programmers survived for decades without these tools,but back in those days, software wasn't anywhere nearly as big, and real-world expectations on software were not as high (mostly because most of the real world didn't even know what computers could do yet).
As you say, the cause for such changes is usually the result of a lack of planning. But in my experience, the real world rarely has a clear picture of what they actually want when a project starts... and if we all just waited until we had a guarantee that functional requirements weren't going to change, a lot of software just wouldn't get written at all. In my experience, when you start writing, you just develop what you can as extensibly as you know how, with the expectation that you will have to refactor everything later, and at some point, through ongoing functional requirement changes, the software ultimately begins to asymptotically approach what the client says that they want, and you get paid for your work.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Nice non-sequiter.
The quality of a programmer is measured by many factors, knowing the system he is working on means he knows the build system well.
That whooshing sound is you missing the point.
Are you saying you can't quickly do anything if there isn't one giant button for you to push?
What are you even talking about?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are obviously in a conversation that is over your head.
I guess you fall into the has to use IDE's category and are offended that you don't care enough to learn your profession.
I guess I fall into the category of not having a clue as to what using an IDE has to do with pushing "giant buttons".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why in the world would using an IDE make you code at 1/5 of your normal speed? Functionally, and for the most part, an IDE is primarily just a text editor... it just happens to have features which can make doing certain operations faster than doing them in an editor that wasn't as programming language-aware as IDE's often are. When you aren't using any of the features specific to the IDE, why would it slow you down at all?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What are the most noteworthy features of vim that you have noted are missing from other editors? Or is it vim's modality that appeals to you most (in which case, even very basic notepad-style editors would be inferior)?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because of decades of muscle memory in one editor, and most of the IDE editors I've used in the past were just awful, and because you're stuck in a lousy MDI interface
Also, if the best you can do is insult somebody who doesn't happen to share your values about what the best tools are to use instead of actually specifically addressing the issue being discussed, then it's fairly clear that you don't have any real argument.
As for your "GTFO" concluding remark, why on earth anyone would you ever expect anyone to acquiesce to such an imperative given by a complete stranger on the internet that they will never actually meet? And if you didn't expect acquiescence to the command, why on earth would you have ever given it, short of some sort of desire to use an expletive to make yourself sound tougher than what is remotely possible to achieve while you are still completely anonymous? It's not entirely unheard of in the real world for similar such blustering to be little more than compensation for certain types of personal flaws or insecurities. I don't know you well enough to honestly say what those flaws or insecurities might be, but I can well imagine.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They probably don't trounce any powerful, but strictly text-editing editor's capability in that regard... what they trounce is such editor's ability to assist a competent programmer at being more productive than they would otherwise be if all they had were such an editor.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'