Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Dec 19, 2001 at 04:13 -0800, Brian Hook wrote:
> > Well, there's my favorite IDE, emacs.  Supports every 
> > language you've ever heard of, and every feature (for better 
> > or worse).  Not very fun to learn, though.
> 
> Oooh, ooh, we're treading on dangerous ground here, so, um, I'll try to
> be polite =)
> 
> Emacs is great -- I used it exclusively from about 1991 to 1996.  In
> fact, I used OS/2 2.x ONLY because it had a good Emacs.
> 
> But in the end, Emacs is a text editor, and I think that modern
> programming is going to move us into custom tools, browsers, source code
> analyzers, design analyzers, and all manner of stuff that isn't going to
> be expressible as an Elisp function or an external command line tool.

Whoah, I beg to differ.  I mean, any computable function is
expressible in elisp or even a shell script.  I'm not saying it's the
best tool for every job... (well, I'm thinking that, but not saying it
out loud :)

>  I know that Emacs has managed to do much of this so far through the
> ingenuity of its design and its users, but I have this suspicion
> that going forward that the "text only" model isn't going to work.
> 
> For example, you can't build a Smalltalk like environment in Emacs
> (at least, I don't think you can, but hell, I'm sure someone will
> post a link to something similar =) ).

Heh, try "emacs smalltalk" in google...

Some people (that even I consider a little crazy) do surprising things
with emacs.  Like, did you know that emacs (er, XEmacs anyway) is a
graphical web browser?

> > I've heard this gripe a few times lately, and I really don't 
> > see it. What's wrong with files, really?  Isn't it really 
> > C++'s declare-before-use that's the problem?
> 
> The problem is more along the lines of a lack of global "see it all at
> once" analysis.  The in order parsing of various files, some with
> "declarations" and others with "definitions", is obsolete.  We have
> computers to take away this kind of tedious bookkeeping, but instead I'm
> the one that has to say "Oh, Foo is a class that I define elsewhere".
> 
> In an ideal world you have class definitions that are just in some
> browsable database.  You then fill in the blanks on what they do, the
> class invariants, preconditions, postconditions, etc. and then the tools
> should be able to spit out a complete specification based on your code.

I don't really see the difference... the filesystem *is* a browsable
database.  In a language like Java, the tools *do* spit out a complete
spec based on my code; in C++ I write the spec by hand, but as I see
it that's a language/compiler issue, independent of what text editor I
used or where the code is physically stored.

> The idea of manual comments becomes an artifact of a by-gone age.
> Documentation is necessary, but manual comments (comment == "some text I
> put here to explain this bit of code") should be fairly rare.

Huh?  Code somehow becomes magically less complex?

> The build environment can then parse your entire architecture and
> generate back end code, comments, dependency analysis, etc. all within
> the confines of one environment that UNDERSTANDS the language,
> frameworks and tools instead of just PARSING the language and its tools.
> Emacs can be made to work with a syntax, but it can't be made to
> understand what a language is trying to do.

Hm, sounds like Lisp.  If you just write everything in elisp, then
you've already got this magical environment :) I'm not seriously
saying that's the way to go (I'm not even thinking it this time :).

In response to your general point, that good programming environments
enhance productivity -- I agree completely.  I just disagree with all
your examples :)

> The common complaint against this is that people wedded to Emacs, make,
> grep, perl, etc. will find themselves at the mercy of whatever
> environment is provided.  I don't have a problem with this -- I'm
> completely comfortable in MSDEV, ProjectBuilder, etc.  I can make them
> do what I need them to do, warts and all.  But I do at least understand
> their concerns, even if I do find them misguided =)

I immersed myself in it a couple years ago, and still use it for some
things every day for work, but in my experience MSDEV is a step
backwards in a few critical areas.  And MSDEV is relatively good for a
GUI IDE, as far as I know.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich <tu...@tu...>
http://tulrich.com