griping about development

[Andrew Sutton <asutton21 home com>]

Ahmad Baitalmal wrote:

> Matthew Berg wrote:
>
>> Well, a lot of open source developers stick to the old standbys (vi,
>> emacs, cvs, etc).  But I can see how a strong IDE would be a boon.
>>
>> One thing I'd like to see is such a tool being done keeping the idea
>> of
>> widely distributed development in mind, as well as compatibility
>> with
>> traditional unix tools.
>>
>> Matt
>>
>>
> True, if UNIX was the dominating OS there would not be large demand
> for easier to use IDE's. Yes there is HUGE demand for such things and
> the reason why you don't hear about it that much is simple. You have
> all these freakingly awsome developers who have built their expertiese
> on Win32 and when they switch (or even attempt) they face the big wall
> or "Relearn". The minute they ask for little advise they are either
> ignored or given pointers.
>
> Gnome develoers must realize that a lot of very good developers are
> just watching and trying to "Relearn" silently. If we can bridge the
> gap we can tap into huge amounts of development power.
>
> --
> Ahmadster
> www.BitBuilder.com
>

> Yes, there are already many tools that exist but they are fragmented
and/or unorganized. I see ctags as a
> very good example. Some dude somewhere used it to graphically
represent functions and structs in a tree
> widget. And that's all his tool did. It did it very well (going with
the UNIX ideal of making tools do one
> thing and do it well). Now comes the evolution step which I see it
missing. And that's to incorporate that
> tool into a tangible solution.

> I guess, here is where I'm going, "Build solutions, not just tools".
:)

okay... to conglomerate some email that i missed while i was out all day
:) and i hate to push the development issue, but what the hell...

i've got to be the laziest bastard that ever walked the earth. i hate
writing code when i don't have to and i hate re-inventing the wheel -
especially when were in an age of hovercrafts.

now we all know linux has some phenomenally powerful tools. make,
autoconf, xemacs, glade (when it becomes more widely used), need i go
on. we all know that everybody has their own idea of what the perfect
development environment should be like - mircrosoft devstudio, naturally
;) and we all know that there are lots of projects out there to make
more tools to up the learning curve and make rapid development a
reality. but, as ahmad wisely points out, we should build solutions, not
tools.

if there really is significant interest in building a world class
development platform that integrated every possible tool imaginible and
was still flexible to suit everybody's needs - class browser based on
the gimp =) -, then i think it might be time to start taking steps
toward realizing that goal. to me this means making two lists.
    1. all the tools and wrappers and ide's and what-have-you's for
development.
    2. make a list of all the capabilities you'd like to see in a
design/development environment.

while the process may take some time, i think this is definitely a step
in the right direction. find all the things that exist, how they can be
integrated, and what we'd like to see on top of that integration.

so, is anybody really interested?

Andrew Sutton
asutton21 home com