Re: griping about development

[Geoff Reedy <vader21 imsa edu>]

Unless a lot of mindsets change I don't see there being a Really Good
coded-in-someone's-spare-time-like-many-free-software-projects-are IDE for
GNOME, or for Unix in general, any time soon.  Putting together an IDE is a
long, involved, and complicated project.  Therefore, it would most likey
require an experienced GNOME developer.  Any developer fitting that criteria
will most certainly already have his or her favorite development environment
set up.  Perhaps using vim, Xemacs, or hopefully not pico as Their Favorite
Editor.  They will also have Their Favorite Programming Lanuage, with the
lanuage neutral nature of GNOME and GTK it could be anything from C/C++ to
python to ada to perl to any number of other possiblities.  This developer
will also have Their Favorite Debugging Environment, likely consisting of the
native debugger for their language (probably GDB for C/C++) possibly with a
frontend, such as DDD.  

The developer, lets call him Bob, sits down to work on his grand IDE project.
Bob thinks to himself, self I already have and use a great development
environment.  Bob, who is always careful not to be too selfish and think of
others as well, thinks for a bit and comes to the conclusion that all of the
people who program for GNOME must have a really cool development environment
that works for them, otherwise they wouldn't have so much fun programming.
Thus the motivation to create this grand IDE is greatly reduced, since Bob
already has a wonderful (and if you ask him he might tell you that it is
almost perfect) development environment, it might not be integrated, but it
sure does work well.  Bob sees little point in writing and spending a lot of
time on something he will not use once it is done, therefore the IDE project
barely gets touched, if it does it is only because he accidently blew away
the source tree for his other project and he left his CD wallet with all of
his backup CD-Rs at a friend's house.  

It is possible that Bob is so selfless that he actually sits down and Works
Hard at his IDE project.  The IDE will likey end up looking and acting a lot
like an integrated version of Bob's current development environment, and
since for some reason Bob likes to use ed for his programming (he had a very
disturbed childhood) the editor in his IDE ends up with two panes, one that
shows the current file with line numbers, and the bottom pane that all you
can do is type ed commands into, with a few additions that Bob Always Wished
ed Had.  Since Bob is a Hardcore Hacker, and always codes his user interface
by hand, he forgot to include a UI builder in his IDE (he thought about it
for a while, but he thought that glade ought to be good enough for anyone,
and besides there is no way his tool would be as good as glade anyway).  

In conclusion the barrier to getting an IDE for GNOME that Joe Shmoe the
hardcore windows coder will feel comfortable switching to after many years of
windows software is twofold.  First, many projects to develop an IDE of this
nature stagnate because the developer looses interest (or doesn't have enough
to begin with) in writing an application that he or she will likely not use.
Second, even if the project does get off the ground it will tend to look a
lot like the developers environment, and therefore not very useable for Joe
Shmoe our firendly defector from the windows world.

This almost an essay thing reflects The World As I Currently See It, and may
not actually bear any relevance to the True State of Things.

-- 
Geoffrey Reedy                                       vader21 imsa edu

"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program;" said PDP-1.  "You will never find a more
wretched hive of bugs and flamers.  We must be cautious."
				-- DECWARS