Review of featured applications

Christopher James Halse Rogers raof at ubuntu.com
Fri Mar 26 03:45:37 GMT 2010


On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 03:32 +0000, Shane Fagan wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 14:22 +1100, Robert Ancell wrote:
> > On 26/03/10 14:05, Shane Fagan wrote:
> > >> - Remove Eclipse
> > >>     - Huge download
> > >>     - Only supports Java out of the box
> > >>     - The Eclipse brand is strong enough that it doesn't need promoting
> > >>      
> > > Im going to go out on the limb and suggest we replace it with
> > > Monodevelop it supports mono,java,python,vala....etc although require
> > > the user to install the support for each language.
> > >    
> > My review of all the supplied IDEs showed MonoDevelop to appear to be 
> > the easiest to use, but:
> > - I've never used an IDE for any significant period of time
> > - I didn't use any of the proposed IDEs to do more that write a hello 
> > world program.
> > 
> > We need to consider what sort of user clicks on featured applications 
> > and which users would benefit from the suggested IDE.
> > My experience of IDE users is:
> >   - They're generally passionate users who have a preferred IDE (much 
> > like text editors for non-IDE programmers).  So by suggesting an IDE 
> > we're targeting people who haven't already chosen an IDE.
> >   - IDEs tend be a part of a developer package.  If we suggest 
> > MonoDevelop will users link well to documentation and the developer 
> > community?  Or will it just be a fancy text editor/compiler?
> > 
> > Saying it in a simpler way:
> > - Will an IDE encourage people to learn programming?
> > - Will opportunistic developers be able to use it to complete their 
> > desired project?
> > - Will experienced developers find the suggested IDE helpful or will 
> > they already use their existing IDE/do the research themselves?
> > 
> > 
> Well no it wouldnt encourage people to learn programming. 
> Hmmm I dont think there is any good python IDE for the opportunistic
> developer.
> I dont think many experienced developers use IDEs too much. The ones I
> know in development companies use eclipse (or different flavors of
> eclipse) or text editors. I use netbeans in college but for python I use
> gedit. 

I think Python (and dynamic languages in general) are just really hard
to do good IDEs for, for roughly the same reason that it's hard to do
static fault analysis, at least in general.  In some ways I think it's a
semi-deliberate trade-off - python is much easier to write, but needs to
*be* written.  In the same way that python much easier to unittest, but
needs to be unittested (more than languages with a static type system,
compilers, etc).

IDEs with decent code completion are a joy to work in.  I'd be much less
productive hacking on C# code in emacs than in MonoDevelop.
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