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

[Derek Broughton]

Pete Ryland wrote:

> 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.  

At least one IDE that I can think of: Shift-Ctrl-L.  For simplicity, I
win :-)

> 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 '='.

The two most common that I use, Oracle JDeveloper and Eclipse, do it with a
keystroke.  I win again!

>> 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 "knows" because you ask for one or the other.  I've yet to see evidence
that they have crappy text-editing interfaces.
> 
>> > 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.

RAD IDEs (at least good ones) don't spit out unmaintainable code.  They spit
out code - you _maintain_ the original source.  This has been true for
decades - I was working with systems in the 70s & 80s that produced code
from higher level methodologies.  When you needed to insert your own code,
that's exactly what you did, but within the higher-level source, so you
never tried to maintain the C (or even Cobol) code that was the
end-product.

> 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.

And perhaps not - but if you haven't looked in a few years, you've missed a
lot :-)  I didn't like it a few years back, and I'm still not using it as
much as I could, but it is _definitely_ much improved.
-- 
derek