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

[Arwyn Hainsworth]

On 15/12/06, Pete Ryland <pdr at pdr.cx> wrote:
> 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?
>
Let's see... for starters in the java eclipse environment there is the
auto-import of used classes, the auto completion of valid methods and
quick javadoc lookup for the method at hand.
Combine that with pre-compilation error checking and you've got
something that saves a lot more time than an ordinary text-editor.

> > > 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 Home, shift+down, ctrl-x, down, crtl+v.
No need for the mouse if you don't want to use it.

> 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 '='.
>
Most of them. Actually many of them have a bit more advanced
formatting abilities than auto-indent...

> I could go on.
>
I'm sure you could, but I could probably point out errors with most of
your reasons. Oh there are a few things the good-old text editor
excels at, but writing large-scale programs is best left to the IDE.

> > > 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?
>
It isn't as archaic as you seem to think. And even if it was, the time
saving the few examples I gave provide is enough to offset the
'archaicness' of it.

> > > 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?
>
They are good editors, why should they not have large user bases? But
when it comes to large scale application development, they lose out.

Arwyn