On Friday 14 November 2008 22:05, Mark H. wrote: > On Nov 12, 5:52 am, David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > No, I think that, if at all, we need a single set of macros. As far > > as the IDEs are concerned, if we all try "inventing" our own (or > > plugins for the existing ones), they will all be half-done at best. > > It's better to focus on one project than spread the effort across > > several ones. At least until the developer base is large enough to > > be able to afford such a distribution. > > How would you define "IDE"? ... > > What is it that characterizes an "IDE" for you, if I may ask? ...
I've worked with many IDEs over the years, and hated almost all of them. MPW was very good because it was more a programmable editor and integrated command processor (shell) in a mostly text-based GUI than it was a singly defined IDE (it was kind of a funky Emacs with a poorly designed scripting language, but it allowed you to have what you want, not what its developers decide you should get). JetBrains (formerly IntelliJ) IDEA is decent and it's what I've been using for a couple of years (before that I was using jEdit). What makes IDEA worth learning and using (and its shortcomings worth putting up with) is the incredibly comprehensive static analysis and indexing it does of your entire program and the (reasonably) good way that information is made available to the user. There's too much for me to try to describe, and I don't think I use half of its features. (The latest release has added support for Ruby and Scala and I understand Python is coming.) Syntax coloring is a near triviality, really, and auto-completion only somewhat less so. It's the analytical capabilities that make an IDE better than any good editor. Naturally, dynamic languages limit what can be done in this regard. IDEA has Groovy and Grails support, and the heavy use of dynamically injected methods, e.g., force it to flag many valid uses as questionable and to fail to note many errors that would be made quite clear to the programmer in Java. > mfh Randall Schulz --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
