Re: ARC

[Don Blaheta <address@hidden>]

Quoth Scott McKay:
> At 05:58 PM 11/28/01, Paul Graham wrote:
> >I agree with you about development enviroments.  My personal
> >favorite is vi + load.
> 
> OK, now I'll bait you ;-)
> 
> I think that we as a professional should be collectively embarrassed that
> anybody can make this claim without being stripped of all honors and rank.

I for one use vim and {load,javac,g++}, and I'm perfectly happy with it;
I have yet to see an IDE with an editor that even approached the power
of vim or emacs, not to mention that most of them have their own set of
editor commands to learn (some use emacs commands; virtually none use vi
commands).  That's ridiculous!  Why should every IDE out there have to
code up its own editor?  Furthermore, why should I have to learn a new
editor just to code in a different IDE?  Fortunately, most IDEs have
some way---often unintentional---of using an outside editor.  (DrScheme,
for instance, has a "revert" menu item that works nicely to load an
updated version of the file.  Too bad it's not considered useful enough
for a keyboard shortcut!)

Regarding the vi/emacs divide (which I don't think you were talking
about, but someone will inevitably bring up): it's all about what you're
used to; you get annoyed having to deal with modes, I get annoyed having
to twist my hand into pressing Control-Shift-Meta-Alt-Foo-Bar-Baz-X
every time I want to exectue a command.  Tomato, tomato.  At this point,
vim and emacs are equivalently powerful in the text-editing domain, and
it's silly to a priori advocate one over the other; but I'd advocate
either over any of the IDE editors.

-- 
-=-Don Blaheta-=-=-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=-=-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
« La naissance n'est rien où la vertu n'est pas. »
					--Dom Louis, _Dom Juan_, Molière