RE: [GD-General] dev environments

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

> 1) what are specific examples of great dev environment 
> features (could be great features in otherwise ordinary environments)?

I haven't found a great dev environment yet, but I can point out
specific features that pull things together.

1.  InterfaceBuilder/Cocoa/Obj-C

The way these three components work together is amazing.  It makes
AppWizard and MFC look like a grade schoolers attempt at building the
Space Shuttle.  You see the shape and the intent, but it's obviously not
going to work.  This is how good Obj-C/Cocoa are for building tools --
if I was starting a game company (that had funding, heh), I would give
all the developers a PowerMac, simply because it would be more cost
effective developing tools on OS X than it would be trying to leverage
existing PCs and forcing reluctant toolsmiths to use MFC/Win32/C++.
Yes, it's THAT good.

I can't really explain too much about how this works, a tutorial would
be better.  I highly recommend the free tutorials and PDFs at
developer.apple.com that deal with Cocoa.  The whole NextStep
architecture was just way, way ahead of its time when it came to custom
apps.

In fact, the existence proofs -- the fact that so many high quality
vertical market apps were built with NS -- are pretty strong evidence
that more productive tools and environments WILL be adopted irrespective
of costs.  And NS was not cheap.

2.  The browsing facility in MSDEV

Booo, hsssss!  MSDEV sucks!  Yeah yeah, but for some reason I still get
work done in it, go figure =)  When they added auto-completion for
members when typing "." or "->" on a member -- wow, how helpful is THAT?
Or being able to click on something and say "Show me your definition".

This could be taken much farther than it has though.  Searching based
not on text, but context, would be great (which would remove my
complaint about function overloading -- do a search for "open" and
you'll get a zillion hits, when all you want is "where do I call open on
a HFile object?").  Being able to query for things like the (contrived)
following:

- "Show me all instances of class XYZ, but NOT its derivatives"
- "Show me all instances of class XYZ or its derivatives"
- "Show me anywhere I call this method for this object type, but not its
children"
- "Show me all functions that are overridden but don't call their parent
implementation"
- "Show me all objects that are derived using MI"
- "Show me all abstract classes"
- "Show me what functions I need to implement to make this class
concrete from its abstract parent"

> 2) what are specific examples of dev environments that "put 
> it all together" and boost productivity?

I haven't found one yet, which is how this all got started =)  My
nearest guess would be SmallTalk, but I only know about it from
reputation.

Brian