IDE Question

[Jorgen Grahn]

Re: IDE Question

On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:02:45 -0700 (PDT), jdd <jeremiah.dodds @gmail.comwrote :

On Oct 15, 1:19 pm, "Steve Phillips" <steve...@gmail .comwrote:

>Hi All,
>I am just wondering what seems to be the most popular IDE. The reason
>I ask is I am currently at war with myself when it comes to IDE's. It
>seems like every one I find and try out has something in it that
>others don't and viceversa. I am in search for the perfect IDE and
>after many months of searching, I always come back to IDLE to do what
>I need to do. I want to use Komodo badly but the one issue I have with
>that is sometimes the auto-complete works and other times it doesn't.
>Even if I carbon copy a script.
>>
>Thanks in advance,
>Steve P

>
I would personally recommend that you take the time to learn your way
around a powerful text editor such as emacs or vim (I use emacs,
myself), however that may not fit well with your personal editing
tastes, and the learning curve is a bit steep. The editing tastes
problem can be solved once you learn your way around a powerful text
editor (emacs, for instance, is practically infinitely customizable),
and the power you get from using them is amazing.

I agree. And the reason is this: learning to use a text editor well
takes years -- meaning that after years you still learn new things
that help you type better/faster/with less strain on your ancles. You
don't want that to be tied to programming Python.

To pick an example: what Emacs calls dabbrev-expand. You type a
few letters of a word, call on dabbrev-expand, and cycle through
words in your open files which start with those letters. This is
very useful in Python code, but it's equally useful when writing
mail, C code, documentation ...

Most people I've seen programming use their editor as if it was
Windows Notepad. It's easy to get an advantage over them, by being
willing to learn a bit. (The downside is that watching them program
will be like watching someone trying to ride a bike with flat tyres ...)

/Jorgen

--
// Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
\X/ snipabacken.se R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

[Fabio Zadrozny]

Re: IDE Question

Isn't Eclipse kind of project oriented? I.e. not suited for opening a

single file, anywhere, and viewing/editing it. I get the impression
that it prefers to have some "project" or "workspace" file which
groups a set of files and contains configuration, build rules and so
on. The guy three postings up suggested a general-purpose text editor.

Yes, it prefers to have a project or workspace (which really helps you
navigating through the source, so, it's one thing I usually see as
positive, not negative). Still, you can use it to edit files outside
of its workspace -- that's supported on Pydev -- but it looses some of
those features (which are not usually available on regular editors
anyway, so, that'd probably be ok if comparing with an editor, not an
IDE)

(As a side note: I don't use Eclipse myself, but I have seen novice
programmers editing Python code with it, and what saw wasn't
impressive. They *did* some kind of Python "plugin" installed, but
were sitting there pressing SPACE to indent every line manually.)

Not sure which plugin they had, but I'm pretty positive that if they
had Pydev installed they'd have auto-indent without any problems (I
can assure you that auto-indent is a feature that received a lot of
attention in Pydev).

Cheers,

Fabio

[Ben Finney]

Re: Loosely-coupled development environment

Jorgen Grahn <grahn+nntp@sni pabacken.sewrit es:

On Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:47:36 +1100, Ben Finney <bignose+hate s-spam@benfinney. id.auwrote:

Instead, I find the greater gain comes from a working environment
of *loosely-coupled* tools, with standard well-defined interfaces,
that one can flexibly mold and reconnect to meet whatever task is
at hand. The deeper this extends into the operating system, the
more the system as a whole will be able to support this
flexibility, and the more likely the tools will have been designed
to do so.

Because of the inescapable central role in our craft of
manipulating text files, essential in this development environment
is a highly-customisable text editor with a broad *and* deep
library of existing customisations, to maximise the amount of work
already done for you when embarking on work in an area that is, to
you, new.

>
You think like I think, but I think your standards are too high. I
like claiming "my IDE is Emacs and Unix", but in fact I know very
little about how to customize Emacs using elisp

No, I'm in the same situation: my Emacs Lisp knowledge is virtually
non-existent. Fortunately, just about anything I want Emacs to do has
already been programmed by someone else, so in practice all I need to
know is how to access the community's extenstions, as said above.

I use a Unix shell on the side to do the non-editing tasks which I
guess you train your editor to do.

Yes, I didn't stress the importance of a full-blown Unix shell (with
all the commands one normally expects at such a shell) in such an
environment. I think “powerful editor (Emacs or Vim) plus Unix shell
environment” is a good first approximation of my recommended
development environment.

(good sigmonster, have a cookie)

--
\ “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… |
`\ It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in |
_o__) the opposite direction.” —Albert Einstein |
Ben Finney

[Jorgen Grahn]

Re: IDE Question

On Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:17:35 -0300, Fabio Zadrozny <fabiofz@gmail. comwrote:
[I wrote]

>(As a side note: I don't use Eclipse myself, but I have seen novice
>programmers editing Python code with it, and what saw wasn't
>impressive. They *did* some kind of Python "plugin" installed, but
>were sitting there pressing SPACE to indent every line manually.)

>
Not sure which plugin they had, but I'm pretty positive that if they
had Pydev installed they'd have auto-indent without any problems (I
can assure you that auto-indent is a feature that received a lot of
attention in Pydev).

Ok, then it wasn't Pydev, or a very old or misconfigured one. I didn't
know at that time whether there was decent support for Python in
Eclipse or not, so I decided whatever the problem was, it was their
problem :-)

/Jorgen

--
// Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
\X/ snipabacken.se R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!