Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[J C L. <cl...@ka...>]

On Mon, 24 Dec 2001 11:20:18 -0800 
Brian Hook <bri...@py...> wrote:

>> Obviously your approach works very well for you. Do you know of
>> other people who work the same way?

> Tons.  TONS.

> Back when I was in college, I religiously used Unix and tvtwm.
> The idea of using anything other than Emacs, focus-follows-mouse,
> tcsh and a virtual desktop manager was mind bogglingly hideous to
> me.  I couldn't imagine how others that needed to get work done
> could possibly survive in a Windows environment.

> Of course, I got over that =)

> Now I realize that when doing what is fundamentally text editing
> that I can survive in just about any environment because the real
> work is between my ears, not at my fingertips.  

Part of the deal for me is attempting to export as much as I can of
that gooey stuff between my ears out onto the screen.  I try to
build an interface that my mind automatically reacts to by adopting
the appropriate context, frameset, set of recollections, etc just
upon seeing in.  The, "Oh yeah, I was ... and now lets see where
that lead..." ideally needs to happen in less than a second after I
switch contexts.

> My earlier argument for better environments isn't so much about
> getting better, monolithic text editing environments, but
> eschewing text editing as the fundamental interface we do things.

In contrast I tend to devolve everything to text.  Its more data
dense at the human UI level.

> I just think that the next logical step is to have tools that are
> fully integrated and look at things as classes, hierarchies,
> interfaces, etc. instead of whitespace and keywords and
> identifiers and files.

Fair dinkum, and I'd probably use and like them if they weren't
monolithic, could be easily disassembled and rebuilt/replugged in
personally suiting patterns, etc.  

One of the basic bits about the MS approach to development which
bugs me is that assumption that you're going to use the MS tools
everywhere.  Why can't I rip out the MS editor and replace it
transparently with MultiEdit, QEditPro, SlickEdit, XEMacs, or
something else?  (Apocryphal question) Why isn't the system built
with cleanly drawn interfaces so I can rip out and replace any other
component as well, replacing the compiler, replacing the debugger,
replacing the linker, replacing the tag tracking system, etc.

Components and interfaces damnit.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
cl...@ka...               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.