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Linux IDE from Cygnus
An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us that
Cygnus is planning to ship an IDE for Linux this summer.
It's called Code Fusion and it'll have a lot of competition
with CodeWarrior and more already out there. But it will
support C/C++ and Java.
I applaud Cygnus Solution's decision to release an IDE for Linux, and I hope it attracts new coders to the platform. However, I've always found IDE's an anti-climax on any platform. The amount of time I expended on learning the quirks of another editor, key bindings for compiling, etc. was never rewarded by increased productivity.
While an editor like vi or emacs, and a debugger like gdb may look daunting to new users, learning them is far more useful than learning an IDE. The IDE has one task - providing a frontend for development. A standard Unix editor (and this includes GUI ones like Nedit) is far more rewarding to learn, as it can be used for more general tasks than programming.
I've seen some IDE's that allow the user to specify which editor to use for code-editing. This really invalidates the IDE concept, as the while point of an IDE is to provide integrated tools, but they can't be relied on to support the features of vastly different editors.
Another gripe about IDE's is that they usually employ wrapper utilities for programs like make and gcc. This is fine until something breaks. Having done some of my programming on Windows NT 3.51, I can honestly say that those who learn programming in VC++ are stumped when the IDE 'breaks'. They are unable to grasp the fact the VC++ is just a frontend to a make utility, command line compiler and debugger. When VC++ failed to work on a project file, I simply edited the make file by hand and compiled from the command line. My co-workers didn't have the first idea about how to do this, having learnt to code on VC++ or Borland IDE's.
Chris Wareham
There are three valid uses for an ide:
-Class browser: See a tree with all the classes/members in your project and just hit one click to take you exactly to a method definition. Or view a graphical inheritance tree.
-Syntax completion: If you're just doing straight Unix C systems programming, no GUIs, and you have plenty of experience, sure you only need to look up the occasional command. But if you're programming against a massive GUI API (Windows, KDE, etc.) with a class library that you didn't write, syntax completion is key. Who the hell knows all three overloaded forms of some obscure command to manipulate a tree control? Who the hell really wants to? An IDE will pop up a parameter list for you instantly.
-GUI design: Look, creating dialogs is not going to be an intellectually stimulating programming task. So do it with a visual editor in 5 minutes, rather than tweaking around manually for hours. Then automatically generate the message handlers for the dialog and get started with real programming.
Good IDEs can make a serious productivity difference if they're used for the right tasks and if you KNOW HOW TO USE THEM. There is very much a mindset to each IDE, just as there is to Emacs, vi, etc. If you approach Visual C++ by thinking of it as just an even bigger, slower version of emacs with different keybindings, it will do you know good. But if you think in its visual terms, you'll get a lot more done.
I personally think that programmers should be comfortable with both text editor/make and visual/IDE programming. It sharpens your skills when you come at a problem from a different angle.