Seriously Impressive: Sun Java Studio Creator - Ubuntu's killer app?

[Pete Ryland]

On 14/12/06, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Baloney.  I'd say that there are so many fallacies in thinking that you can
> save any time by hand-hacking code in primitive editors.

Can you provide some examples of said fallacies please?

> > But then the text
> > editors that come with most of these tools barely support
> > cut/copy/paste, and pale into comparison with the facilities available
> > in emacs or vim.
>
> No, they don't.  I'll grant that emacs can usually do the same things with
> less overhead.

Here's a quite common example.  How do you transpose two lines?  In vi
you simply type ddp, and in Emacs you can do Ctrl-x Ctrl-t.   How do
you do this in a typical IDE?  Reach for mouse, select the line, press
Ctrl-x, press backspace, reach for mouse again, click at the end of
next line, press Enter, press Ctrl-V.  I really don't know how people
can put up with that.

Or how about auto-indenting a block of code?  How many IDEs offer
anything like that?  In vim it's as easy as preceeding a movement key
with '='.

I could go on.

> > Why would I want to use a crappy text editor as a
> > trade off for typing myconnection = db.connect("dbname").  And of
> > course they don't just do a simple connect to your database;
>
> Of course, they _do_ if that's what you want.
>
> > they'll
> > automatically analyse your database and create EJBs for each of your
> > tables for you to access your data through by a scalable (aka
> > serialized) method call.
>
> And they'll do that if _that's_ what you want.

So how does it know what I want?  And how does this offset having such
an archaic text editing interface?

> > Just say no.
>
> Dinosaur.

To be fair, vim and emacs are still being actively developed and have
huge user bases, and IMO are still superior to anything else that's
come along, so why change?

> > BTW, you may also be interested in a very simple-to-use python gui
> > library I'm working on which turns methods into buttons.  Having not
> > done anything with GTK+ for a few years, I wanted to write some simple
> > frontends with PyGTK, and found little improvement in the learning
> > curve since GTK1.0.  So I've actually set out to simplify the creating
> > of simple GUIs whilst still trying to allow the flexibility that
> > people have come to expect.
>
> So, what you're condemning in all these other IDEs, you're promoting in the
> Python gui you've written?  Makes sense, I guess.

It's a gui *library*, and still just a PoC, but yes, the intention is
to provide a higher level API to pygtk but still have the full pygtk
available for those cases where it's required.  This is a better
approach to making GUI programming easier IMO than to have some RAD
environment spit out pages full of unmaintainable code.

> > Sorry for the divergence of the topic, and for the pimping, but I
> > thought it might be of interest.
>
> It is.  The problem with one-stop IDEs is that they're "one-stop" - they try
> to do everything for everybody, thus piling on the overhead.  My search for
> the perfect IDE has always been a search for something that can do
> everything _I_ want to do while providing as little extra overhead as
> possible.  Eclipse seems best to me because reducing overhead is a matter
> of not loading extra plugins, but I use multiple IDEs because some of them
> do specific things better.

I've actually not tried Eclipse for a few years now, so perhaps it's
time I had another look.  Maybe things have improved enough now to
make the switch worth it.

Pete