Magical Development Environments / Languages
I was catching up on some more of my RSS feed reading and read Aaron Seigo’s entry on programming languages. While Aaron raises some good points, his request for an IDE that magically does everything is a pipe dream. IBM’s Websphere tried to do something similar and it sucked. At least it did when I used Websphere in early 2000. Everything was stored in a database (DB2 of course) and as such, broken syntax was identified immediately. But you had to use the Websphere IDE, which had an editor, a versioning client, etc but while the pieces worked, their functionality was all mediocre at best. Seriously. Only IBM fanatics loved Websphere; everyone else was saying “WTF?”. So while everything was magically integrated, not one of the pieces would have stood out if on it’s own. It was somewhat like using a tightly woven IDE that used MS Notepad as it’s editor, telnet as it’s CVS client, and voodoo for the administrative functionality (my examples suck, but you get where I’m going with this). And you couldn’t really use external tools and it didn’t really support plugins. So it did a lot of stuff on the fly for you but gone was the joy of writing code because it was so tedious to use all the mediocre tools.
For the past ten years, I’ve used multiple tools when developing. At first, it was Emacs and a bunch of command-line tools. Then I changed to various IDEs and various support tools (xxdiff, Cervisia, etc). Now I’ve settled on Eclipse, which does a reasonable job of allowing me to use a single tool when doing Java development. But that’s not out of the box; out of the box Eclipse is just okay. To make it better, you have to add a bunch of plugins to do various extras, like support JSPs and Tomcat.
So maybe Aaron’s request isn’t a pipe dream. Or maybe I’ve just lowered my standards and given in a bit. I still prefer Cervisia as a CVS client but use Eclipse’s built in one as it’s more convenient. I don’t think you’ll ever find Aaron’s request in anything but an open IDE that allows plugins to be built on top of it. Eclipse (and in talking to developers there several other IDEs) is certainly moving closer towards the dream becoming reality. That all said, I will speculate that the more you try to automate everything as Aaron requests, the more you need to tie the pieces together and the harder it is for that project to be open. And when that starts happening then the cycle towards a ‘mediocre at best’ IDE begins.
Wed, 12 Oct 2005 14:12 Posted in Programming
